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JPrice 35 Cents, 






By WALTER LECKY, 

Author of "Green Graves in Ireland,'^ '■'■Adirondack Sketche.%" etc. 



JOHN ]V1URF»HY & CO., PublisHers, 

BAI^TIMORE. 



DOWN AT CAXTON'S. 



By WALTER LECKY, \ \ 

Author of *^Green Graves in Ireland" "Adirondack 

\ 
Sketches," etc. 






V 






% 






BALTIMORE: 
JOHN MURPHY & CO 
1895. 



Copyright, 1895, by Wm. A. McDermott. 






PRESS OF JOHN MURPHY & CO. 



\p 






:? 

^ 
^ 



I DEDICATE 

TZr/^' SERIES OF SKETCHES 

DONE AT ODD MOMENTS STOLICN FROM THE BUSY LIFE OF A COUNTRY 

DOCTOR, IN THE WILDEST PART OP THE ADIRONDACKS, TO THAT 

DEAR FRIEND, WHO WROTE FOR ME AND OTHER 

WANDERERS — IDYLS OF A SUMMER SEA — 

TO 

CHAELES WAEKEN STODDARD 

OF THE 

Catholic University, Washington, D. C. 



MEN. 



RICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON. 



In that charming and dainty series of 
books published under the captivating title 
of " Fiction, Fact and Fancy," and edited 
by the gifted son of the prince of American 
literary critics, there is a volume with the 
companionable name of Billy Downs. It 
is as follows that Mr. Stedman introduces 
the creator of Billy Downs and a host of 
other characters, mostly types of Middle 
Georgia life, that shall live with the lan- 
iruao-e. "So we reach the tenth milestone 
of our ramble, and while we are resting by 
the wayside let us hail the gentleman who 
is approaching and ask him for ' another 
story.' We who have heard him before 
know that he seldom fails to respond to 

7 



8 RICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON. 

such a request, and always, too, in a man- 
ner quite inimitable. As he comes nearer 
you may observe the dignified, yet courteous 
and kindly bearing of a gentleman of the 
old school. The white hair and moustache, 
the sober dress, betoken the veteran, al- 
though they are almost contradicted by 
eyes and an innate youthfulness in word 
and thought. It is not difficult to recognize 
in Colonel Richard Malcolm Johnston the 
founder of a school of fiction and the dean 
of Southern men of letters." The Colonel 
is the founder of a school of fiction, if by 
that school, we understand those, who are 
depicting for us the Georgia life of the 
ante-bellum davs. In no otherwise can 
we assent to Mr. Stedman's phrase. For 
American critics to claim the dialect school 
of fiction as their own in origin, is on a par 
with their other critical achievements. Di- 
alect was born a long time before Columbus 
took his way westward. The first wave of 



RICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON.. » 

mankind leaving the parent stock, in their 
efforts to survive, carried with them the 
germ of dialect. Fiction in its portrayal 
of men and manners of a given period, 
was bound to reproduce it faithfully — the 
very least to give us a semblance of that 
life. This could not be done in many in- 
stances without the use of dialect. To 
do so were to deprive the portraiture of 
individuality. 

Fiction produced on such lines would be 
worthless. Of late there has been much 
cavil against dialect writers. This cavil, 
strange to say, emanates from the Realists. 

They lay down the absurd code, that 
Art is purely imitative. She plays but a 
monkey part. Her sole duty is to depict 
life, paying leading attention to the por- 
trayal of corns, bunions, and other horny 
excrescences, that so often accompany her. 
Realists will not be persuaded that such 
excrescences are abnormal. From a jaun- 



10 -RICHAED MALCOLM JOHNSTON. 

diced introspection of their own little life, 
they frame canons of criticism to guide the 
world. With these congenial canons lying 
before them, one is astonished, if such a 
phrase may be used in the recent light of 
that school's pyrotechnic display, that they 
can condemn dialect. Granted, for the 
sake of argument, that Art is merely imi- 
tative, will not the first duty of the novel- 
ist be to reproduce the exact language, 
and that when done by the master-hand 
of a Johnston carries with it not only the 
speaker's tone, but the power of producing 
a mental image of the speaker — the very 
acme of the Realists' school? To paint 
a Georgia cracker speaking the ordinary 
Boston- English would be like crowning 
the noble brow of a South Sea native with 
a tall Boston beaver. The effort would 
be unartistic, the effect ludicrous. Colonel 
Johnston believes in the imitativeness of 
Art, to the extent of reproducing for us 



RICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON. 11 

J 

the peculiar dialect of Middle Georgia. 
He has informed us that there is not a 
phrase in his novels that he has not heard 
amid the scenes of his stories. To repro- 
duce these is a distinct triumph of the 
novelist's art, but the Colonel has done 
more ; into his every character has he 
breathed a soul. His figures are not the 
automaton skeletons of the Realists, but 
living men and women who have earnestly 
played life on the circumscribed stage of 
Middle Georgia. 

This life is fast passing away. Prof. 
Shaler, a competent authority, tells us : 
" At present the strong tide of modernism 
is sweeping over the old slave-holding 
States with a force which is certain to clccir 
away a greater part of the archaic motives 
which so long held place in the minds of the 
people. With the death of this generation, 
which saw the rebellion, the ancient regime 
will disappear." It can never be lost as 



12 RICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON. 

long as the novels of Malcolm Johnston 
are extant. There, in days to come, by the 
cheery ingle-nook, will a new generation 
live over in his delightful pages the curious 
life of Georgia. Cuvier asked for a bone 
to construct his skeleton. The readers of 
the Dukesborough tales, Billy Downs, etc., 
will not only have the skeleton, but live 
men and women preserved for them by 
the novelist's elixir. He has known his 
country and kept close to mother earth, 
having in his mind that " no language, 
after it has faded into diction, none that 
cannot suck up feeding juices secreted for 
it in the rich mother earth of common folk, 
can bring forth a sound and lusty book. 
True vigor and heartiness of phrase do 
not pass from page to page, but from man 
to man. . . . There is death in the dic- 
tionary." That the Colonel's language has 
sucked up feeding juices secreted for it in 
the rich mother earth of common folk will 



RICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON. 13 

•J 

be seen on every page. Let us take at 
random the communication of Jones Ken- 
drick to his cousin Simeon Newsome, as to 
S'phrony Miller. Sim is a farmer lad over- 
shadowed by the overpowering " dictionary 
use" of his Cousin Kendrick. Sim has gone 
a-wooin' S'phrony. Kendrick hearing of 
this and urged by his mother and sister, 
comes to the conclusion that he would like 
to have S'phrony himself. This important 
fact he admits to Cousin Sim in the follow- 
ing choice morsel : Sim is overseeing his 
hands on the plantation ; Kendrick ap- 
proaches and is met by Sim. Kendrick 
speaks : 

" Ma and sister Maria have been for 
some time specified. They have both been 
going on to me about S'phrony Miller in a 
way and to an extent that in some circum- 
stances might be called obstropolus, and to 
quiet their conscience I've begun a kind of 
a visitation over there, and mv miad has 



14 RICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON. 

arriv at the conclusion that she's a good, 
nice piece of flesh, to use the expressions 
of a man of the world, and society. What 
do you think, Sim, of the matter under 
consideration, and what would you advise ? 
I like to have your advice sometimes, and 
I'd like to know what it would be under all 
circumstances and appearances of a case 
which, as it stands, it seems to have, and 
it isn't worth while to conceal the fact that 
it does have, a tremendous amount of im- 
mense responsibility to all parties, espe- 
cially to the undersigned, referring as is 
well known in books and newspaper adver- 
tisements to myself. What would you 
say to the above, Sim, in all its parts and 
parties ? " It may interest the reader to 
know that Sim acquiesced " in all its parts 
and parties," and that S'phrony became 
Mrs. Kendrick, while Sim took another 
mate. Of further interest to the imagi- 
nativeeyoung Avoman is the fact, that Mrs. 



RICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON. 15 

IN'ewsome and Mr. Kendrick perishing a 
few years later by some sort of quasi- 
involuntary but always friendly move- 
ments, executed in a comparatively brief 
time, S'phrony and Sim became one. In 
calling Johnston the dean of Southern men 
of letters, Stedman does not define his 
position. Page, the creator of Marse Chan, 
and one of the most talented of Southern 
dialect writers, negatively does so. In an 
article that has literary smack, but lacks 
critical perception, he rates him below Miss 
Murfree, James Lane Allen, and Cable. 
These three writers Page places at the 
head of Southern writers of fiction. Critics 
nowadays will adduce no proof; they sim- 
ply affirm. The text of this discrimination 
should be the exactness of the character 
drawing, the life-like reproduction of envi- 
ronments, and the expertness of the dialect 
as a vehicle to convey the local flavor. 
It will hardly be gainsaid that Johnston 



16 RICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON. 

knows his Georgia no less than Cable 
knows Louisiana. Johnston is a native of 
Greorgia ; the time of life most suscepti- 
ble to local impressions was spent there. 
Cable's boyhood was otherwise. It will 
not be thought of that in the painting of 
Creole life, Cable has excelled the painter 
of Georgia life. In the handling of dialect, 
Johnston and Harris touch the high water 
mark of Southern fiction. It was an old 
critical dictum that an author to succeed 
must be in sympathy with his subject ; 
this may be affirmed of Johnston. It is 
otherwise with Cable, and especially with 
Lane, whose Kentucky pictures are often 
caricatures. Cable poses as the friend of 
the colored man. His pose is dramatic. 
It lends a charm to his jS'ew England 
recitations. We have a great love for 
champions of every kind. The most of 
Mr. Cable's pages deal with Creole life, 
and for that life he has no sympathy. He 



RICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON. 17 

paints it as essentially pagan, albeit it was 
essentially Catholic. A padre makes him 
sniff the air and paw ungraciously. The 
ceremonies of the church are so many 
pagan rites. Cable belongs to the school 
that contemns what it does not understand. 
His pictures of Creole life are untrue, and 
much as they were in vogue some years 
ago, are passing to the bourne of the forgot- 
ten. Johnston, although a living Catholic, 
fond of his church, and wedded to her 
every belief, draws an itinerant preacher 
of the Methodists with as much enthusiasm 
and sympathy as he would the clergy of 
his own church. He has no dislikes, noth- 
ing that is of man but interests this sunny- 
hearted romancer of the old South. 

Strange as it may seem, the knowledge 
of his wonderful power of story-telling 
came late and in an accidental way. It is 
best described in his own words. " Story- 
writing," said the Colonel, ''is the last 



18 EICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON. 

thing for me in literature. I had pub- 
lished two or three volumes on English 
literature, and in conjunction with a friend 
had written a life of Alexander Stephens, 
and also a book on American and European 
literature, but had no idea of story-writing 
for money. Two or three stories of mine 
had found their way into the papers before 
I left Georgia. I had been a professor of 
English literature in G-eorgia, but during 
the war I took a school of boys. I re- 
moved to Baltimore and took forty boys 
with me and continued my school. There 
was in Baltimore, in 1870, a periodical 
called the Southern Magazine. The first 
nine of my Dukesborough Tales were con- 
tributed to that magazine. These fell into 
the hands of the editor of Harper^ s Maga- 
zine^ who asked me what I got for them. 
I said not a cent, and he wanted to know 
why I had not sent them to him. ' Neelers 
Peeler's Conditions ' was the first story for 



KICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON. 19 

which I got pay. It was published in the 
Century^ over the signature of Philemon 
Perch. Dr. Holland told Mr. Gilder to 
tell that man to write under his own name, 
adding that he himself had made a mistake 
in writing under a pseudonym. Sydney 
Lanier urged me to write, and said if I 
would do so he would get the matter in 
print for me. So he took ' Neelers Peeler's 
Conditions,' and it brought me eighty dol- 
lars. I was surprised that my stories were 
considered of any value. I withdrew from 
teaching about six years ago, and since 
that time have devoted myself to author- 
ship. I have never put a word in my 
book that I have not heard the people use, 
and very few that I have not used myself. 
Powelton, Ga., is my Dukesborough. I 
was born fourteen miles from there. 

" Of the female characters that I have 
created, Miss Doolana Lines was my fa- 
vorite, while Mr. Bill Williams is my 



20 EICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON. 

favorite among the male characters. I 
started Doolana to make her mean and 
stingy like her father, but I hadn't written 
a page before she wrenched herself out of 
my hands. She said to me, ' I am a woman, 
and you shall not make me mean.' These 
stories are all of Greorgia as it was before 
the war. In the hill country the institu- 
tion of slavery was very different from 
what it was in the rice region or near 
the coast. Do you know the Georgia ne- 
gro has live times the sense of the South 
Carolina negro ? Why ? Because he has 
always been near his master, and their 
relations are closer. My father's negroes 
loved him, and he loved them, and if a 
negro child died upon the place my mother 
wept for it. Some time ago I went to the 
old place, and an old negro came eight 
miles, walked all the way, to see me. 

" He got to the house before five o'clock 
in the morning, and opened the shutters 



RICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON. 21 

while I was asleep. With a cry he rushed 
into the room. ' Oh, Massa Dick.' We 
cried in each other's arms. We had been 
boys together. One of my slaves is now 
a bishop — Bishop Lucius Holsey, one of 
the most eloquent men in Georgia." 

These charming bits of autobiography 
show us the sterling nature of Malcolm 
Johnston, a nature at once cheerful, kind 
and loving. It is the object of such na- 
tures, in the pessimistic wayfares of life, 
to make friends, illuminating them with 
sunshine and tickling them with laughter. 



MARION CRAWFORD. 



In front of the Ara Coeli I stood. A 

swarthy Italian was telling of the dramatic 

death of Cola di Rienzi. His English was 

lightly worn, but it seemed to please his 

3 



22 MAEION CRAWFORD. 

audience, and it was for that purpose they 
had paid their lire. The crazy-quilt lan- 
guage of the cicerone and his audacious 
way of handling history, made him cut an 
attractive figure in the eyes of most tour- 
ists, whose desires are amusement rather 
than study. As a type, to use a phrase 
borrowed from the school of psychological 
novelism, he was a study. To the student 
Rome is a city of absorbing interest, to the 
ordinary American bird of passage a dull 
place. It all depends on your point of 
view. If you are a scholar, a collector of 
old lace, or a vandal, Rome is your happy 
hunting ground. If these pursuits do not 
interest you, Roman beggars with all sorts 
and conditions of diseases, sometimes by 
nature, mostly by art, Roman fleas, and 
the gaunt ghosts of the Campagna quickly 
drive you from the capital of the Caesars 
and Popes. A few other annoyances might 
be added, such as sour wine, whose mist 



MARION CRAWFORD. 23 

fumes are not to be shriven by your bottle- 
let of eau de Cologne, garlic on the fringe 
of decay, and the provoking smell of salt 
fish in the last stage of decomposition. 
But you have come to Rome ; it is a name 
to conjure with, and despite the drawbacks, 
you must have a glimpse, an ordinary 
bowing acquaintance, with the famed old 
dame. At the office, an English office, in 
the Piazza di Spagna, you have asked for 
a " droll guide." Who could listen to a 
scholarly one amid such active drawbacks 
as wine, fleas and fish ? Michael Angelo 
Orazio Pantacci is your man. What do 
you care for good English ? Did you not 
leave New York to leave it behind ? What 
do you care for Roman history ? Pantacci 
is your man, and his lecture on Cola di 
Rienzi is a masterpiece. A stranger joined 
our little crowd. Pantacci at that moment 
had attained his descriptive high-water 
mark. His pose and voice were touchingly 



24 MARION CRAWFORD. 

dramatic. Cola was, as he expressed it, "to 
perish." The stranger smiled and passed 
on. His smile was a composite affair. It 
was easy to see in it Michael Angelo's 
historical duplicity and our ignorant sim- 
plicity. The stranger was tall, with the 
shoulders slightly stooping, a nose as near 
an approach to the Grecian as an American 
may come, a heavy black mustache, ruddy 
cheeks, that whispered of English food 
mellowed with the glowing Chianti. Who 
is that man ? I said to my companion, 
whose eyes had followed the stranger 
rather than Pantacci. " That," said he, 
"is Marion Crawford, the author of the 
Saracenesca books. You remember read- 
ing them at Albano." Tell me something 
about him. He is a very clever man. 
Cola has perished ; let us leave Pantacci. 
On the way to Cordietti's tell me something 
of his life. He knows how to tell a story, 
an art hardly to be met with in contem- 



MARION CRAWFORD. 25 

porary fiction. Fiction has abrogated to 
herself the whole domain of life, and thus 
the art of telling a story for the story's 
sake is lost. Fiction has a mission. She 
freights herself with all isms. Scott, Man- 
zoni, even the great wizard of Spanish 
fiction, could they live again, were failures. 
Introspection is the cult, and,' happily for 
their fame, they knew nothing of it. These 
great masters told us how scenes of life 
were enacted. Why, they left to the in- 
quisitive and later-day brood of commenta- 
tors. Since then the all absorbing scientific 
spirit prevails, and we moderns brush away 
the delightful humor of Dickens for the 
analytical puzzles of Henry James ; the 
keen satire of Thackerav for the coxcombe- 
ries of George Meredith. Fairy cult in- 
terests none, modern children are ancient 
men. Scepticism is rampant, and the cause 
of it is, in a great manner, due to the 
modern novelist. This product of the 19th 



26 MARION CRAWFORD. 

century world-spirit coolly tells us that 
romance lies dead. Realism has taken her 
place. If we are to believe the theories 
of its votaries, it is without an ideal — a 
mere anatomical transcript of man. What 
this theory leads to is well illustrated by 
the gutter filth of Zola and Catulle Mendes. 
It makes novel writing a trade. One ceases 
to be astonished at the output, if he thor- 
oughly grasps the difference between a 
tradesman and an artist. Trade is a word 
much used by realists. G-rant Allen, writ- 
ing of that realistic necromancer, Guy de 
Maupassant, has nothing apter to define 
his position than the phrase " he knows 
his trade.'* In point of fact. Grant Allen 
enunciates a truth in this phrase, one that 
might be carried still further, by saying 
that his whole school are journeymen la- 
borers, tradesmen, if you prefer, turning 
out work, tasteless and crude, at the bid- 
ding of the erubescent young person of the 



MAKION CRAWFORD. 27 

period It is readily assumed that work of 
this kind is not, despite the word-jugglery 
of their school, realism. It does not deal 
with the true man, but with a phrase, and 
that abnormal. A better phrase in use in 
speaking of the works of this school is, 
'' literature of disease." The artist who 
lives must have a model, and that we 
call the ideal. The nearer he approaches 
this the more lasting his work. All the 
great artists had ideals. Workmen may 
be guided by the rule of thumb. The first 
lesson a great artist learns is, " The art 
that merely imitates can only produce a 
corpse ; it lacks the vital spark, the soul, 
which is the ideal, and which is necessary 
in order to create a living organic reality 
that will quicken genius and arouse en- 
thusiasm throughout the ages." The gulf 
between the trade- novelist and the artist- 
novelist is of vital importance. The former 
believes that art is simply imitation, the 



28 MARION CRAWFORD. 

latter, that art is interpretation. One is a 
stone-cutter, the other a sculptor. 

Crawford's canon is that art is inter- 
pretative, not imitative, and, moreover, he 
has a story to tell and tells it for the story's 
sake. He has no affinity with that school 
so pointedly described by the Scotch nov- 
elist, Barrie, as the one " which tells, in 
three volumes, how Hiram K. Wilding 
trod on the skirt of Alice M. Sparkins 
without anything coming of it." *' Cordi- 
etti's," said my friend, " give the order and 
I will tell vou what I know of Crawford." 
Paulo, said I to the waiter, some Chianti, 
and — well, a pigeon. " Crawford," said my 
friend, " was born in Rome about thirty - 
five years ago. His career has been a 
strange one, full of life. His earl}^ years 
were spent in Rome, where his father was 
known as a sculptor, his boyhood in the 
vicinity of Union Square, his early man- 
hood in England and India. In the latter 



MARION CRAWFORD. 29 

country he was the editor, proof-reader, 
typesetter of a small journal in the natives' 
interest. As such he was a thorn to the 
notorious freak, Blavatskv. Crawford is 
an American by inheritance, an Italian by 
breeding, an Englishman by training, an 
Indian by virtue of writing about India 
with the knowledge of a native. In 1873, 
by the financial panic, Mrs. Crawford lost 
her large fortune, and Marion was forced to 
shift for himself. He became a journalist, 
and as such wandered over most of the in- 
teresting part of the globe. On his return 
to New York, at the request of his uncle, 
Sam Ward, the epicurean, who had dis- 
cerned his kinsman's rare power of story- 
telling, he wrote his first book, Mr. Isaacs. 
It was a success. Of the writing of that 
book, Crawford has told us it was ''very 
curious. I did not imagine that I pos- 
sessed a faculty for story- writing, and I 
prepared for a career very diff*erent from 



30 MARION CRAWFORD. 

the career of a novelist. Yet I have found 
that all my early life was an unconscious 
preparation for that work. My boyhood 
was spent in Rome, where my parents had 
lived for many years. There I was put 
through the usual classical training — no, it 
was not the usual one, for the classics are 
much better taus'ht in Italv than in this 
country. A boy in Italy by the time he is 
twelve is taught to speak Latin, and his 
training is so thorough that he can read it 
with ease. From Rome I went to Cam- 
bridge, England, and remained at the uni- 
versity several years. Then I studied for 
a couple of years at the German univer- 
sities. During this time I went in for the 
sciences, and I expected to devote myself 
to scientific work. Finally I went off to 
the East, where I did a good deal of ob- 
serving, and continued my studies of the 
Oriental languages, in which I had taken 
considerable interest. It was while I was 



MARION CRAWFORD. 31 

in the East that I met Jacobs, the hero of 
Mr. Isaacs. Many of the events I have 
recorded in Mr. Isaacs were the actual 
experiences of Jacobs." 

The writing of his first novel occupied 
the months of May and June, 1882 ; it was 
published the same year, and at once es- 
tablished its author in the front rank of 
living American writers of fiction. Since 
then Crawford has written twenty volumes 
of fiction. Crawford is frank and he tells 
us how he manages to produce in a few 
years the amount of an ordinary lifetime. 
"By living in the open air, by roughing it 
among the Albanian mountaineers, wan- 
dering by the sunny olive slopes and vine- 
yards of Calabria, and by taking hard work 
and pot luck with the native sailors on 
long voyages in their feluccas," are the 
means of the novelist to hold health and 
make his penwork a laxative employment. 
In these picturesque journeys, he lays the 



32 MARION CRAWFORD. 

foundation of his stories, makes the plots 
and evolves the characters. He does not 
believe in Trollope's idea of sitting down, 
pen in hand, and keep on sitting until at 
its own wild will the story takes ink. The 
story in these excursions has been fully 
fashioned, and it becomes but a matter of 
penmanship to record it. How quickly 
this is done may be seen from the rapid 
writing of the novelist, which averages 
6,000 words the working day. This rapid 
composition has its defects, defects that are 
in some measure compensated by the pho- 
tographic views of the life and manners of 
the people. These views are in the rough, 
but they are truer than when toned down. 
Poetry needs paring. The greatest novels 
have been those that came like Crawford's, 
fresh from the brain, and were hastily 
despatched to the printer. Scott did not 
mope over the sheets. Thackeray's were 
written to the tune of "more copy." Your 



MARION CRAWFORD. 33 • 

American critic, Stoddard, says : — " That 
Crawford is a man with many talents, and 
with great fertility of invention', is evident 
in every story that he has written. He 
has written more good stories and in more 
diverse ways than any English or Ameri- 
can novelist. It does not seem to matter 
to him what countries or periods he deals 
with, or what kind of personages he draws, 
he is always equal to what he undertakes." 
It may interest you, in ending this bio- 
graphic sketch, to add that he is a convert 
to the Catholic Church, and with the Ameri- 
can critic's idea in view, a cosmopolitan. 
I was not astonished by the former infor- 
mation. To those who know Italy and Mr, 
Crawford's wonderful drawing of it, there 
could be but one opinion, that the faith of 
the novelist was the same as that of his 
characters. No Protestant novelist, no 
matter how many years he had lived in 
Italy, could have drawn the portraits that 



34 MARION CRAWFORD. 

play in the Saracenesca pages. One of his 
friends had this in his mind's eye when he 
wrote of the superiority of the novelist's 
writings on Italy over those of his country- 
men. This writer tells us that " Crawford 
added the indispensable advantage of being 
a Catholic in religion, a circumstance that 
has not only allowed him a truer sympathy 
with the life there, but has afforded him 
an open sesame to many things which must 
be sealed books to Protestants." As to my 
friend's summing up Crawford as a cosmo- 
politan, in the every-day meaning of that 
word, I take issue. Cosmopolitan novelist 
is one w^ho can produce a three- volume 
novel, whose scenes are laid in all the great 
centers of commerce, while he sits calmly in 
his library. No previous study of his nov- 
elistic surroundings are necessary. Does 
the age want the beginning of the plot in 
Cairo or Venice, half-way at Tokio, and a 
grand finale bevond the Grates Ajar ? Your 



MARION CRAWFORD. 35 

novelist is ready to turn out the regulation 
type with the greatest ease. Cosmopolitan 
novel-writing is simply a trade. The living- 
through of local and artistic impressions, 
the study of types in their environment, 
the color of surroundings are unnecessary. 
Imagination, divorced from nature study, 
is left to guide the way. 

Once Crawford followed this school, and 
the result was " An American Politician," 
the "worst novel ever produced by an 
American." Had Crawford been a trades- 
man he might have produced a passable 
book, but being an artist, he failed, not 
knowing what paint to mix in order to get 
the coloring. The difference between an 
artist and tradesman, the one must go to 
nature direct, the other takes her second- 
hand. No artist can catch the lines of an 
Italian sunset from a studio window in 
London. " Art is interpretive, not imita- 
tive." Crawford is only a novelist in the 



36 MARION CRAWFORD. 

true sense when he knows his characters 
and their surroundings. This is amply 
proven in the charming volumes that make 
his Saracenesca series. Here he is at home, 
so to speak. The Rome of Pius IX, with 
its struggles, its ambitions, the designs of 
wily intriguers, the fall of the temporal 
power^of the Papacy, the rise of an united 
Italy, the flocking to Rome of the scour- 
ings and outcasts of the provincial cities, 
the money-mad schemes of daring but igno- 
rant speculators, and over all the lovely 
blue Italian sky, rise before us in all their 
minuteness at the biddance of Marion 
Crawford. His work is hardlv inferior to 
genuine history ; " for it affords that in- 
sight into the human mind, that acquaint- 
ance with the spirit of the age, without 
which the most minute knowledge is only 
a bundle of dry and meaningless facts." 
Who that knows Rome of the Popes and 



MARION CRAWFORD. 37 

Rome of the Vandals will not feel heav}^- 
hearted at these lines ? 

" Old Rome is dead, too, never to be old 
Rome again. The last breath has been 
breathed, the aged eyes are closed forever, 
corruption has done its work and the grand 
skeleton lies bleaching on seven hills, half 
covered with the piecemeal stucco of a 
modern architectural body. The result is 
satisfactory to those who have brought it, 
if not to the rest of the world. The sep- 
ulchre of old Rome in the new capital 
of united Italy." The exclusiveness of 
the patrician families of Rome, families 
that a brood of novelists pretend to draw 
life-like, is happily hit by the painter 
Gouache. 

Gouache, long resident in Rome, being 
asked what he knows of Roman families, 
replies, " Their palaces are historic. Their 
equipages are magnificent. That is all 
foreigners see of Roman families." Who 
4 



38 MABION CRAWFORD. 

that has seen the great Leo carried through 
the grand sala, a vision of intellectual 
loveliness, will not recall it as he reads? 
" The wonderful face that seemed to be 
carved out of transparent alabaster, smiled 
and slowly turned from side to side as it 
passed by. The thin, fragile hand moved 
unceasingly, blessing the people." " True," 
said my friend, "his pages are delicious 
bits of the dead past. At every sentence 
we halt and find a memory. He has the 
sense of art, if Maupassant's definition 
of it as 'the profound and delicious en- 
joyment which rises to your heart before 
certain pages, before certain phrases ' be 
correct." 

Dinner was finished. A check, Paulo. 
We rose and went. 



CHARLES WARREN STODDARD. 39 



CHARLES WARREN STODDARD. 



Venice, that lovely city by the sea, has 
been described a thousand times by the 
painter's brush, by the poet's pen. It is 
the last bit of poetry left to us, in the ever 
increasing dulness of this world — the only 
place that one would expect to meet a 
goblin or a genial Irish fairy. It is not 
the intention of this paper to describe the 
queenly city. More than a thousand kodak 
fiends are daily doing that work, with the 
eagerness of a money-lender and the ar- 
tistic sense of a fence painter. A city may, 
however, have many attractions, other than 
its magic beauty ; nay, even a dull uninter- 
esting place may become interesting from 
some great historic event that happened 



40 CHARLES WARREN STODDARD. 

there, or from some impression caught and 
treasured in memory's store-house. Venice 
has a charm for me other than the poetry 
that lurks in its every stone ; it was there 
that I first dipped into one of those rare 
books whose charms grow around the heart 
soft and green as a vine-tendril. 

A professor of mine, one of those men 
who hugs one saying in life, thereon build- 
ing a false reputation for wisdom, was in 
the habit of saying, " Accidents are the 
spice of life." As it is his only contribu- 
tion approaching the threshold of the phi- 
losopher's goddess that I heard in the five 
years of his weary cant, I willingly record 
it. To me it expresses a truth, albeit five 
years is a long hunt. Illustrations some- 
times improve the text, and this brief 
paper, by the way, is but a design to en- 
hance the professor's. It was an accident, 
pure and simple, that made me wend my 
way to the Rial to, there to lean against the 



CHARLES WARREN STODDARD. 41 

parapet watching some probably great un- 
known painting, something that might be 
anything the imagination cared to conjure 
up. It was an accident that made an Eng- 
lish divine ask me in sputtering French 
what the painter was working on. It was 
an accident that made me inform him in 
common American English that my tele- 
scope, by some accidental foresight, was at 
my lodgings. The divine was a genial 
man, one of those breaths of spring that 
we sometimes meet in life. Invited to my 
lodgings, he fancied a few tiny volumes of 
the apostle of " sweetness and light " to 
pass those hours that hang heavily, in all 
lands save Eden. In my pocket he thrust, 
as he remarked, " a no ordinary book, one 
that will hold you as in a vice." This pro- 
ceeding was rather remarkable, had he not 
in the same breath invited me to take a 
gondola to one of the isles, and there enjoy 
the pocketed volume. It is delightful to 



42 CHARLES WARREN STODDARD. 

meet a genuine man, speaking your mother- 
tongue, after weary months of Italian delv- 
ing. To the little isle we went, an isle 
known to readers of Byron, as the place 
where he labored long under Armenian 
monks to learn their guttural tongue, the 
monks say " with success." I knew noth- 
ing, in those days, of destructive criticism. 
After a tour in the monastery, of the ordi- 
nary Italian type, I lay down on the green 
sward under the beneficent shade of a huge 
palm, wrapped in the odors of a thousand 
flowers that sleepily nodded to the music 
of the creamy breakers on the rocky shore. 
Books have their atmosphere as well as 
men. Deprive them of it, and many a 
charm is lost. I drew the little volume 
from my pocket, and there in that atmos- 
phere, akin to the one in which it was 
begot, I read of life in summer seas, life 
that floats along serene and sweet as a 
bell- note on a calm, frosty night, life 



CHARLES WARREN STODDARD. 43 

** Where the deep blue ocean never replies 
To the sibilant voice of the spray." 

My Anglican friend was unable to give 
any clue to the author's identity, other 
than what the meagre title-page afforded. 
The title-page was of that modest kind that 
says, " Enter in and see for yourself." It 
had none of the tricks of book-making, and 
none of the airs of a parvenu. Under other 
skies than Italian I learned that the author 
of "South Sea Idyls," Charles Warren 
Stoddard, poet and traveller, was one of 
the kindest and most modest of men. In 
truth, that it was the combination of these 
rare qualities that had kept him from the 
crowd when lesser men made prodigious 
sales of their wares. To the man of me- 
diocrity, it is a tickling sensation to float 
with the current to the music of the shore- 
rabble, who shout from an innate desire to 
hear their voices. With the possessor of 
that rare gift, genius, the mouthings of the 



44 CHARLES WARREN STODDARD. 

present count little ; it is for a future hold 
on man, that he toils. It is to do some- 
thing, to paint a face, to carve a bust whose 
glorious shape shall hand to the ages a 
form of beauty, to weave a snatch of melody 
that shall go down the stream of time con- 
soling dark souls. Mediocrity is mortal, 
genius immortal. The common mind, with- 
out bogging in metaphysics or transcen- 
dentalism, subjects so dear to American 
critics, may readily grasp the destination 
by a comparison in poetry of the " Pro- 
verbial Philoso]3hy" with " In Memoriam," 
in prose " Barriers Burned Away," with 
" Waverly." Another point for medio- 
crity, perhaps from its possessor's view the 
best : it is well recompensed in this life. 
The very reverse is the case with genius. 
If then the author of the " South Sea Idyls " 
is not as popular with the crowd as the 
writers of short stories who revel in analy- 
sis, whether it be a gum-boil or the falling 



CHARLES WARREN STODDARD. 45 

of my lady's fan, he can have no fear. It 
is but his badge of superiority. The few 
great men, who are the literary arbiters of 
each century, have spoken, and their ver- 
dict is the verdict of posterity. " One does 
these things but once," say they, " if one 
ever does them, but you have done them 
once for all ; no one need ever write of the 
South Sea again." Here, it is well to im- 
press on the casual reader, in the light of 
this verdict, a great historic truth cobwebbed 
over by critical spiders ; that it was not 
the Italians that gave the chaplet to Dante, 
nor the Spaniards to Cervantes, nor the 
Portuguese to Camoens, nor the Germans 
to Groethe, but the great cosmopolitan few, 
scattered over the world, guardians of the 
garden of immortality. 

Charles Warren Stoddard was born in 
Rochester, N. Y., 7th August, 1843. At 
an early age he left his native state, with 
his family and emigrated to California, 



46 CHARLES WARREN STODDARD. 

that fertile foster-mother of American lit- 
erary men. In that delightful state, region 
of plants and flowers, was passed his boy- 
hood, a boyhood rich in promise, strength- 
ened by a good education. With a natural 
bent for travel, fed by the tales of travellers 
and the waters of romance, it was his happy 
luck, at the age of twenty-three to find 
himself appointed to that really bright 
journal, the San Francisco Chronicle^ as its 
correspondent. The commission was a rov- 
ing one, and the young correspondent was 
left free to contribute sketches in his own 
inimitable way. Let us believe that the 
editor well knew the choice mind he had 
secured in the young writer, and so know- 
ing was unwilling to put restrictions of the 
common newspaper kind in his way. How 
could such a correspondent be harnessed 
in the dull statistics and ribald gossip of 
these days? It was otherwise, as we his 
debtors know. He was to wander at his 



CHARLES WARREN STODDARD. 47 

own sweet will. The slight vein of sweet 
melancholy that came with his life, drove 
him far from the grimy haunts of civili- 
zation, far from the sickening thud of men 
thrown against the cobble-stones of poverty. 
He sailed away with not a pang of sorrow 
to those golden isles embedded in summer 
seas, where the moon 

" Seems to shine with a sunny ray, 
And the night looks like a mellowed day. 

Isles where all things save man seem to have grown 

hoar in calm. 
In calm unbroken since their luscious youth." 

To a man of Stoddard's genius and deli- 
cate perception, one thing could have been 
foreseen. These lands yet warm with the 
sunshine of youth would play melodies on 
his soul, as the winds on ^olian harps ; 
melodies hitherto unknown to the jaded 
working world. That he could catch these 
airs and give them a tangible form, w^as 



48 CHARLES WARREN STODDARD. 

not SO sure. Others had heard these siren 
airs, but failed to yoke them to speech. 
Melville, now and then, had reproduced 
a few notes ; notes full of dreamy beauty, 
making us long for the master who was 
to give the full and perfect song. That 
master was found in Stoddard. He pro- 
duced, as Howells so finely has said, " the 
lightest, sweetest, wildest, freshest things 
that ever were written about the life of that 
summer ocean," things " of the very make 
of the tropic spray," which " know not if 
it be sea or sun." Whether you open with 
a prodigal in Tahiti and see for yourself 
" that there are few such delicious bits of 
literature in the language," or follow the 
writer, who, thanking the critics, prefers to 
find out for himself the worth of a writer, 
commences at the beginning with the 
charming tale of " Kana-ana," you will be 
in company with the acute critic who has 
pronounced the life of the summer sea. 



CHARLES WARREN STODDARD. 49 

'' once done," by Stoddard, " and that for 
all time." What should we look for in 
such a book ? " Pictures of life, for melody 
of language, for shapes and sounds of 
beauty ; " and these are to be found with- 
out stint in the " South Sea Idyls." The 
form of Kana-ana haunts me, " with his 
round, full girlish face, lips ripe and ex- 
pressive, not quite so sensual as those of 
most of his race ; not a bad nose, by any 
means ; eyes perfectly glorious — regular 
almonds — with the mythical lashes that 
sweep." Kana-ana, who had tasted of civ- 
ilization, finding it hollow, pining for his 
own fair land, and when restored to the 
shade of his native palms, wasting away, 
dying delirious, in his tiny canoe, rocked 
to death by the spirit of the deep. Or is 
it Taboo — " the figure that was like the 
opposite halves of two men bodily joined 
together in an amateur attempt at human 
grafting, whose trunk was curved the wrong 



50 CHARLES WARREN STODDARD. 

way ; a great shoulder bullied a little 
shoulder, and kept it decidedly under ; a 
long leg walked right around a short leg 
that was perpetually sitting itself down on 
invisible seats, or swinging itself for the 
mere pleasure of it," meeting him by the en- 
chanting cascade. Or is it Joe of Lahaina, 
whose young face seemed to embody a 
whole tropical romance. Joe, his bright 
scape-grace, met with months after in that 
isle of lost dreams and salty tears, the 
leper-land of Molokai. Who shall forget 
the end of that tale, where the author steals 
away in the darkness from the dying boy? 
" I shall never see little Joe again, with 
his pitiful face, growing gradually as dread- 
ful as a cobra's, and almost as fascinating 
in its hideousness. I waited, a little way 
off in the darkness, waited and listened, 
till the last song was ended, and I knew 
he would be looking for me to say good 
night. But he did not find me, and he 



CHARLES WARREN STODDARD. 61 

will never again find me in this life, for 
I left him sitting in the dark door of his 
sepulchre — sitting and singing in the mouth 
of his grave — clothed all in Death." 

It matters little whether it be Kana-ana, 
Taboo or Joe of Lahaina, the hand of a 
master was at their birth, the spell of the 
wizard is around them. The full develop- 
ment of Stoddard's genius is not found in 
character-drawing, great as that gift un- 
doubtedly is, but in his wonderful repro- 
duction of the ever-changing hues of land 
and sea, under the tropical sun. What 
description is better fitted to fill the eye 
with beauty, the ear with melody, than 
these lines from the very first page of his 
"South Sea Idyls?" 

" Once a green oasis blossomed before us 
— a garden in perfect bloom, girdled about 
with creamy waves ; within its coral cinc- 
ture pendulous boughs trailed in the glassy 
waters ; from its hidden bowers spiced airs 



52 CHARLES WARREN STODDARD. 

stole down upon us ; above all the triumph- 
ant palm trees clashed their melodious 
branches like a chorus with cymbals ; yet 
from the very gates of this paradise a 
changeful current swept us onward, and 
the happy isle was buried in night and 
distance." 

It is not easy to make extracts from this 
charming book. It is a mosaic, to be read 
as a whole. A tile, no matter how beauti- 
ful it may be, can give no adequate con- 
ception of the mosaic of which it forms a 
part. It may, however, stimulate us to 
procure it. These extracts taken at ran- 
dom, would that they might have the same 
effect. The book, once so rare, is now 
within the easy reach of all. The new 
edition lately published by the Scribners 
is all that one could ask, and is a fitting- 
home for the undying melodies of the sum- 
mer seas. To read it is to be reminded of 
the opening lines of Eudymion. 



CHARLES WARREN STODDARD. 53 

" A thing of beauty is a joy forever, 
Its loveliness increases ; it will never 
Pass into nothingness ; but will keep 
A bower quiet for us and a sleep, 
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing." 

Stoddard's other works are a volume of 
poems, San Francisco, 1867 ; " Mashallah," 
a work that produces, as no other work 
written in English, the Egypt of to-day. 
In this work his touch is as light as that of 
G-autier, while his eyes are as open as De 
Amicis; and a little volume on Molokai. 
At present he is the English professor at 
the Catholic University. 

With the quoting of a little poem, " In 
Clover," a poem full of his delicate touches, 
I close this sketch of a writer to whom I 
am much indebted for happy hours under 
Italian skies and in Adirondack camps. 

" O Sun ! be very slow to set ; 
Sweet blossoms kiss me on the mouth ; 
O birds ! you seem a chain of jet, 
Blown over from the south. 

6 



54 MAUKICE FRANCIS EGAN, 

O cloud ! press onward to the hill, 
He needs you for his falling streams 
The sun shall be my solace still 
And feed me with his beams. 

O little humpback bumble bee ! 

smuggler ! breaking my repose, 
I'll slily watch you now and see 
Where all the honey goes. 

Yes, here is room enough for two ; 
I'd sooner be your friend than not ; 
Forgetful of the world, as true, 

1 would it were forgot." 



MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN. 



The poet-critic Stedman, in his book on 
American poetry, gives a few lines to what 
he terms the Irish- American school. His 
definition is a little misleading, as some 
of the poets he cites were more American 



MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN. 55 

than the troop of lesser bards that grace 
his polished pages. It is rather a strange 
notion of American critics that Prof. Boye- 
sen, having cast aside the language of 
Norseland to sport in the larger waters 
of our English tongue, is metamorphosed 
into a true American, while the literary 
sons and daughters of Irish parents, born 
and striking root in American soil, are 
marked with a foreign brand. It is the 
old story of English literary prejudice re- 
produced by American critics. American 
modistes go to Paris for their fashions, 
American critics to the Strand for their 
literary canons. It is pleasant to know 
that the bulk of the people stay at home. 
In this Irish-American school one meets 
with the name of Maurice Francis Egan. 
"A sweet and true poet" is Stedman's 
criticism. Coming from a master in the art 
of literary interpretation, it must occupy a 
place in all coming estimates of Mr. Egan's 



56 MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN. 

poetry. This criticism is, nevertheless, short 
and unsatisfactory, it gives no true idea of 
the poet's place in the letters of his country. 
It merely, if one is inclined to agree with 
Stedman, establishes that Mr. Egan has a 
place among the bards. In the hall of Par- 
nassus, however, there are so many stalls 
that the ordinary reader prefers to have 
the particular place assigned to each bard 
pointed out. The author of this sketch, 
while not accredited to the theatre of Par- 
nassus, may be able to give to those who 
are not under the guidance of a uniformed 
usher some hints whereb}^ Mr. Egan's par- 
ticular place may be discerned ; that place 
is among the minor poets. The major 
stalls are all empty, waiting for the com- 
ing men, so glibly prophesied about by the 
little makers of our every-day literature. 
Maurice Francis Egan, poet, essayist, 
novelist, journalist, and all-round literary 
man, was born in Philadelphia, Pa., May 



MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN. 57 

24, 1852. His first instructors were the 
Christian Brothers, at their well-known 
La Salle College in that city. From La 
Salle he went to Georgetown College, as 
a professor of English. After leaving 
Georgetown he edited a short-lived A^ent- 
ure, Mc Gee's Weekly. In 1881 he became 
assistant editor of the Freeman's Journal^ 
and remained virtually at the head of that 
paper until the death of its founder and 
the passing of the property to other hands. 
The founding of the Catholic University, 
and the acceptance of its English professor- 
ship by Warren Stoddard, made a vacancy 
in the faculty of Xotre Dame University. 
This vacancy was offered to and accepted 
by Mr. Egan. 

There are few places better fitted as a 
poet's home than Notre Dame. Beautiful 
scenery to fill the eye, brilliant society to 
spur the mind, and a spacious library 
freighted with the riches of the past. In 



58 MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN. 

comparison with the majority of the Catho- 
lic writers, the poet's journey in life has 
been comparatively smooth, though far 
from what it should have been. He has 
published the following volumes : — " That 
Girl of Mine," 1879; "Preludes," 1880; 
" Song Sonnets," London, 1885 ; " Theatre," 
1885; "Stories of Duty," 1885; "Garden 
of Roses," 1886 ;- " Life Around Us," 1886 ; 
"Novels and Novelists," 1888; "Patrick 
Desmond," 1893 ; " Poems," 1893. To this 
list must be added innumerable articles in 
magazines and weekly journals. Judged 
by the signed output, it is safe to write 
that the English professor of Notre Dame 
is a very busy man. The wonder is that 
a mind so occupied by so many diverse 
things can write entertainingly of each. 

The poet's first book, a few sonnets and 
poems, was for " sweet charity's sake," and 
had but a limited circulation. It is safe to 
say that every first book of a genuine poet, 



MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN. 59 

despite its crudities, will show the seeker 
signs of things to come. Egan's book was 
not without promises, but in truth these 
promises are only partly fulfilled in his 
latest volume of verse. There may be 
many reasons adduced for this disparity 
between promise and fulfilment. One of 
them is the haste with which poetry is pub- 
lished. Horace's dictum of using the file 
has been long since forgotten. The rabble 
calls for poetry, and, like the Italian and 
his lentils, care little for the quality. If 
the poet barkens to the calls (and who 
among the contemporary bards has laughed 
it to scorn?) he exchanges perpetuity for 
the present, notoriety for fame. Nor will 
the rabble leave the poet freedom in choos- 
ing his material. He is simply a trades- 
man, and must use what is placed at his 
disposal. Things great and grand must be 
left unto that day when the poet, untram- 
melled bv worldly care, shall write his 



60 MAUEICE FRANCIS EGAN. 

heart's dream. If the time ever comes, 
the poet learns in sorrow that his dreams 
will never float into human speech, for the 
hand has lost its cunning. So the days of 
youth and manhood pass, blowing bubbles 
or decorating platitudes. Death snatches 
the poetling, and oblivion is his coverlid. 
The songs he sang died with the rabble. 
The new generation asked for a poet that 
could drill into the human heart and bring- 
forth its secrets — a listener to nature, her 
interpreter to man. To such a one the 
vocabulary of a minor bard is useless. 
Another reason, more applicable to our 
author, is that he has been unfortunate to 
be a pioneer in Catholic American litera- 
ture. His poems, appealing, as they do, 
to a distinct class, and that far from being 
a book-buying one, will fail to attract the 
lynx-eyed critic who cares only for the 
general literary purveyor. From such a 
source, the poet's chance of corrective criti- 



MAURICE FRANCIS EG AN. 61 

cism has been slight. The class to which 
Mr. Egan belongs has no criticism to oifer 
its literary food givers. If an author's book 
sells, his name is blazoned forth in half a 
hundred headless petty journals. His most 
glaring defects become through their glasses 
mystic beauty spots. He is invited to lec- 
ture on all kinds of subjects. A clique 
grows around him, whose duty it is to puff 
the master. The reasons, frankly adduced, 
have limited the scope and dwarfed the 
really tine genius of Maurice Egan. His 
latest volume, while containing many poems 
that reveal hidden powers, has much of the 
crudity and faults of earlier work. These 
poems speak of better things that will be 
fulfilled by the poet if he will consecrate 
himself wholly to his art, shutting his mind 
to the rabble shout and eulogious criticism. 
Then may he hear the rhythms and ca- 
dences of that music whose orchestra com- 
prises all things from the shells to the 



62 MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN. 

stars, all beings from the worm to man, 
all sounds from the voice of the little bird 
to the voice of the great ocean. To these 
translations men will cling to the last, and 
in their clinging is the poet's fame. In his 
shorter poems, and notably in his sonnets, 
Mr. Egan is at his best. Here his scope is 
broader, his touch is firmer. The mastery 
of musical expression, lacking in his longer 
poems, is here to be met with in the ful- 
ness of its beauty. As a writer of sonnets, 
Mr. Egan has had great success. In this 
line of writing he is easily at the head of 
the younger American school of poets. "A 
Night in June " is a charming piece of 
word painting, full of beauty and power. 
The reader of this exquisite sonnet will feel 
how deftly the poet has put in words the 
silent magic of such a night, when air and 
earth have songs to sing. In the sonnet to 
the old lyric master Theocritus, the poet's 
graceful interpretative touch is equally felt. 



MAUKICE FRANCIS EGAN. 63 

Daphnis is mute, and hidden nymphs complain, 

And mourning mingles with their fountain's song ; 

Shepherds contend no more, as all day long 

They watch their sheep on the wide, Cyprus plain : 

The master-voice is silent, songs are vain ; 

Blithe Pan is dead, and tales of ancient wrong 

Done by the gods, when gods and men were strong. 

Chanted to reeded pipes, no prize can gain. 

O sweetest singer of the olden days. 

In dusty books your idyls rare seem dead; 

The gods are gone, but poets never die ; 

Though men may turn their ears to newer lays, 

Sicilian nightingales enraptured 

Caught all your songs, and nightly thrill the sky. 

The sonnet "Of Flowers " gives a happy 
setting to a beautiful thought : 

There were no roses till the first child died, 
No violets, no balmy-breathed heartsease, — 
No heliotrope, nor buds so dear to bees, 
The honey-hearted suckle, no gold-eyed 
And lowly dandelion, nor, stretching wide 
Clover and cowslip cups, like rival seas. 
Meeting and parting, as the young spring breeze 
Runs giddy races, playing seek and hide. 



64 MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN. 

For all Flowers died when Eve left Paradise, 

And all the world was flowerless awhile, 

Until a little child was laid in earth. 

Then, from its grave grew violets for its eyes. 

And from its lips rose-petals for its smile ; 

And so all flowers from that child's death took birth. 

To those who have lovingly lingered 
over the pages of Maurice de Guerin, 
pages that breathe the old Grreek world of 
thought, the following sonnet, that paints 
that modern Grrecian with a few masterlv 
strokes, will be keenly relished. It is the 
fine implications of these lines that is the 
life of our hope for the poet and the future. 

Maurice de Guerin. 

The old wine filled him, and he saw, with eyes 
Anoint of Nature, fauns and dryads fair, 
Unseen by others ; to him maiden-hair 
And waxen lilacs and those birds that rise 
A-sudden from tall reeds, at slight surprise, 
Brought charmed thoughts ; and in earth ever^'^where, 
He, like sad Jacques, found a music, rare 



MAURICE FRANCIS EG AN. 65 

As that of Syrinx to old Grecians wise. 

A Pagan heart, a Christian soul, had he, 

He followed Christ, yet for dead Pan he sighed, 

Till earth and heaven met within his breast! 

As if Theocritus, in Sicily, 

Had come upon the Figure crucified, 

And lost his gods in . deep, Christ-given rest. 

As an essayist, Mr. Egan has touched 
many subjects, and always in an enter- 
taining vein. Some of his essays are re- 
markable for their plain speaking. He 
has studied his race in their new surround- 
ings, knows equally well their virtues and 
failings. If he can take an honest delight 
in the virtues, he is capable of writing 
with no uncertain sound on the failings, 
failings that have been so mercilessly used 
by the vulgarly comic school of American 
playwrights. His essays are corrective 
and should find their way into every Irish- 
American home. They would tend to cor- 
rect many abuses and aid in the detection 



66 MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN. 

of those bunions so sacredly kept on the feet 
of the Irish race — last relic of the Penal 
times. A recent essay throws a series of 
blue lights — the color so well liked by 
Carlyle — on our shallow collegiate system. 
Will it be read by our Catholic educators ? 
That is a question that time will answer. 
If they read it aright they will be apt to 
change their system of teaching the classics 
parrot-like, an empty word translation. 
They will transport their pupils from the 
bare class-room to the sunny skies of Greece 
and Rome, and under these skies see the 
religious dogmas, the philosophical sys- 
tems, the fine arts, the entire civilization 
of those ancient thought giving nations. 
"What professor," says de Guerin, "read- 
ing Virgil and Homer to his pupils, has 
developed the poetry of the Iliad or ^neid 
by the poetry of nature under the Grecian 
and Italian skies. Who has dreamt of 
showing the reciprocal relation of the poets 



MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN. 67 

to the philosophers, the philosophers to the 
poets, and these in turn to the artists — 
Plato to Homer, Homer to Phidias ? It is 
a want of this that makes the classics so 
dull to youth, so useless to manhood." 

Mr. Egan, as a novelist, has written 
many books, dealing mostly with Irish- 
American life. These novels are filled 
with strong, manly feeling, and Catholic 
pictures beautiful enough to arrest the 
attention of the most fastidious. In these 
days of romance readers such books must 
serve as an antidote to the subtle poison 
that permeates the Active art. They are 
pleasant and instructive, and that is a high 
tribute in these days of dulness and spiced 
immorality. Take him all in all, perhaps 
the most acceptable tribute is, that what- 
ever may be his gifts in the various roles 
he has essayed, heavy or slight, they have 
been ungrudgingly used for his race and 
religion. 



68 JOHN B. TABB. 



JOHN B. TABB. 



A friend once wrote to me : " What do 
you know about a poet who signs his name 
John B. Tabb, his poems are delicious?" 
My answer was, that I knew nothing of his 
personal history, but that his poems had 
found their way into my aristocratic scrap- 
book. Here I might pause to whisper that 
the adjective aristocratic, in my sense, has 
nothing haughty about it. When joined to 
the noun scrap-book, a good commentator 
— they are scarce — would freely translate 
the phrase the indwelling of good poetry. 
Since then my personal knowledge of the 
poet has grown slowly, a slight stock and 
no leaves. Even that, like my old coat, is 
second-handed. Such material, no matter 
how highly recommended by the keepers of 



JOHN B. TABB. 69 

the golden balls, is usually found to be a 
poor bargain. But here it is, keeping in 
mind that rags are better than no clothing, 
and that older proverb — half a loaf is better 
than no bread. 

" John B. Tabb, (I quote) was born in 
Virginia, when or where I know not. Be- 
coming a Catholic he studied for the priest- 
hood and was ordained." Here my data 
fails me. At present he is the professor of 
literature in St. Charles' College, Maryland. 
It is something in his favor, this scanty 
biographical fare. Where the biography 
is long, laudatory, and in rounded periods, 
it is approached as one would a snake in 
the grass, with a kind of fear that in the 
end you may be bitten. " May I be skinned 
alive," said that master of word-selection 
and phrase-juggler, Flaubert, " before I 
ever turn my private feelings to literary 
account." And the reader, with the stench 
of recent keyhole biography in his nostrils, 
6 



70 JOHN B. TABB. 

shouts " bravo." Flaubert's phrase might 
easily have hung on the pen of the retiring- 
worshipper of the beautiful, "the Roman 
Catholic priest, who drudges through a 
daily round of pedagogical duties in St. 
Charles' College." This quoted phrase may 
stand. Pedagogy, at best, is a dull pursuit 
for a poet. It is not congenial, and I have 
held an odd idea that whatever was not con- 
genial, disguise it as you may, is drudgery. 
And all this by way of propping the quoted 
sentence. The strange thing is that in the 
midst of this daily round of drudgery the 
poet finds time to produce what a recent 
critic well calls " verse-gems of thought." 
These verse-gems, if judged by intrinsic 
evidence, would argue an environment other 
than a drudgery habitation. In truth, it 
is hard to desecrate them by predicating 
of them any environment other than a 
spiritual one. 

This brings us to write of Fr. Tabb's 



JOHN B. TABB. 71 

poetry that it is elusive, from a critical 
point of view. When you bring your pre- 
conceived literary canons to bear upon it, 
they are found wanting — too clumsy to test 
the delicacy, fineness of touch, and the 
permeated spiritualism embodied in the 
verse-gem. It is well summarized in the 
saying that " it possesses to the full a white 
estate of virginal prayerful art." One 
might define it by negatives, such as the 
contrary of passion poetry. The point of 
view most likely to give the clearest con- 
ception would be found in the sentence: 
an evocation from within by a highly spir- 
itualized intelligence. The poet has caught 
the higher music, the music of a soul in 
which dwell order and method. In other 
words, he has assiduously cultivated to its 
fullest development both the spiritual sense 
and the moral sense. 

It is easy to trace in Fr. Tabb's poetry 
the influence of Sidney Lanier. It has 



72 JOHN B. TABB. 

been asserted, and with much truth, that 
Lanier's influence has strangely fasci- 
nated the younger school of Southern 
poets. Sladen, in his book on Younger 
American Poets, tells us that " Lanier 
differs from the other dead poets included 
in his book, in that he was not only a 
poet but the founder of a school of 
poetry." To his school belongs Fr. Tabb, 
a school following the founder whose aim 
is to depict 

"All gracious curves of slender wings, 
Bark mottlings, fibre spiralings, 
Fern wavings and leaf flickerings. 

Yea, all fair forms and sounds and lights, 
And warmths and mysteries and mights, 
Of Nature's utmost depths and heights." 

The defects of this school are best seen in 
the founder. He was a musician before a 
poet, and helplessly strove to catch shades 
by words that can only be rendered by 



JOHN B. TABB. 73 

music. Fr. Tabb has learned this limita- 
tion of his school. For the glowing semi- 
pantheism of Lanier he has substituted 
the true and no less beautiful doctrine 
of Christianity. All his verse-gems are 
redolent of his faith. They are religious 
in the sense that they are begotten by 
faith and breathe the air of the sanctuary. 
To read them is to leave the hum and 
pain of life behind, and enter the cloister 
where all is silent and peaceful, where 
dwelleth the spirit of God. Of them it 
is safe to assert that their white estate 
of virginal, prayerful art shall constitute 
their immortality. Fr. Tabb has not, as 
yet, thought fit to give them a more per- 
manent form than they have in the current 
magazines. Catholic literature, and espe- 
cially poetry, is so meagre that when a 
true singer touches the lyre it is not to be 
wondered at that those of his household 
should desire to possess his songs in a 



74 JOHN B. TABB. 

more worthy dwelling than that of an 
ephemeral magazine. In the absence of 
the coming charming volume I quote from 
my scrap-book a few of the verse-gems, 
thereby trusting to widen the poet's audi- 
ence and in an humble way gain lovers 
for his long-promised volume. 

What could illustrate the peculiar genius 
of our poet better than the delicious gem 
that he has called 

" The White Jessamine." 

I knew she lay above me, 
Where the casement all the night 

Shone, softened with a phosphor glow 
Of sympathetic light, 

And that her fledgling spirit pure 
Was pluming fast for flight. 

Each tendril throbbed and quickened 

As I nightly climbed apace. 
And could scarce restrain the blossoms 

When, anear the destined place, 
Her gentle whisper thrilled me 

Ere I gazed upon her face. 



JOHN B. TABB. 75 

I waited, darkling, till the dawn 

Should touch me into bloom. 
While all my being panted 

To outpour its first perfume. 
When, lo ! a paler flower than mine 

Had blossomed in the gloom ! 

" Content " is another gem of exquisite 
thought and workmanship. 

Content. 

Were all the heavens an overladen bough 

Of ripened benediction lowered above me, 
What could I crave, soul-satisfied as now. 
That thou dost love me ? 

The door is shut. To each unsheltered blessing 

Henceforth I say, " Depart ! What wouldst thou of 
me?" 
Beggared I am of want, this boon possessing, 
That thou dost love me. 

" Photographed " may well make the 
trio in the more fully illustrating his 
genius : — 



76 JOHN B. TABB. 

Photographed. 

For years, an ever-shifting shade 
The sunshine of thy visage made ; 
Then, spider-like, the captive caught 
In meshes of immortal thought. 

E'en so, with half-averted eye, 
Day after day I passed thee by. 
Till, suddenly, a subtler art 
Enshrined thee in my heart of heart. 

"Not even the infinite surfeit of Colum- 
bus literature of the last six months can 
deprive Fr. Tabb's tribute in Lippincott's 
of its sweetness and light," says the Re- 
view of Reviews : 

With faith unshadowed by the night, 

Undazzled by the day, 
With hope that plumed thee for the flight 

And courage to assay, 
God sent thee from the crowded ark, 

Christ bearer, like the dove, 
To find, o'er sundering waters dark, 

New lands for conquering love. 



JOHN B. TABB. 77 

As a final selection, we may well conclude 
these brief notes on a poet with staying- 
powers by quoting a poem, contributed to 
the Cosmopolitan^ called " Silence; " a poem 
permeated with his fine spiritual sense : 

Temple of God, from all eternity 

Alone like Him without beginning found ; 
Of time, and space, and solitude the bound. 

Yet in thyself of all communion free. 

Is, then, the temple holier than he 

That dwells therein ? Must reverence surround 
With barriers the portal, lest a sound 

Profane it ? Nay ; behold a mystery ! 

What was, remains ; what is, has ever been : 

The lowliest the loftiest sustains. 
A silence, by no breath of utterance stirred — 

Virginity in motherhood — remains. 
Clear, midst a cloud of all-pervading sin. 

The voice of Love's unutterable word. 



78 JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE. 



JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE. 



In this age of rondeaus and other feats 
in rhyme, it is pleasant to meet with a 
little book that abhors all verse tricks of 
the fin-de-siecle poets, and judiciously 
follows the old masters. Such a little 
book peeps at me from a corner in 
my library, marked in capitals, " Poems 
Worth Reading." It was given to me 
years ago by its author, and as a remem- 
brance, a few lines from the poem that 
appealed most to my intellect in those 
days, was written on its ily-leaf. It 
was its author's first book, and was put 
forth with that shrinking modesty that 
has heralded all meritorious work. Of 
preface, that relic of egotism, there was 
none. 



JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE. 79 

It was dedicated to one who was close 
to his heart, to 

" John Boyle O'Reilly, 
My very dear friend, and an honorable gentleman." 

It had O'Reilly's warm word to speed and 
gain it a hearing, a word that would have 
remained unwritten were it not that the 
little volume, of its own worth, demanded 
that the word but expressed its merit. 
Since those days, it has travelled and 
found a ready home. Its gentle humor 
has made it quotable in the fashionable 
salons, its quaintness tickled the lonely 
scholar, stinging notes against wrong and 
its brilliant biting to the very core of silk- 
dressed sham, bespoke a hearty welcome 
in the haunts of the poor and oppressed. 
The volume was one of promise and 
large hope. Of it O'Reilly wrote : " Not 
for years has such a first book as this 
appeared in America." This recognition 



80 JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE. 

was but a truth. The author is a true 
poet, not a rhyme trickster or a cherry- 
stone filer, that brood so thoroughly de- 
tested by O'Reilly. He has something 
to say, a genuine, poetical impression to 
give in each poem. His genius, as that 
of most poets of Celtic blood, is essen- 
tially dramatic. This may best be seen in 
that fine, man-loving poem, " Netchaieff." 
Netchaieff, a Russian Nihilist, was con- 
demned to prison for life. Deprived of 
writing materials, he allowed his finger- 
nail to grow until he fashioned it into a 
pen. With this he wrote, in his blood, 
on the margin of a book, the story of his 
sufferings. Almost his last entry was a 
note that his jailer had just boarded up 
the solitary pane which admitted a little 
light into his cell. The " letter written 
in blood" was smuggled out of prison and 
published, and Netchaieff died very soon 
after. The poet's opening lines, relating 



JAMES JEPFKEY ROCHE. 81 

to the Czar, Netchaieff's death in prison, 
show that the human interest of this poet 
swallows up all other interests. The human 
alone can heat his blood and rouse in 
impassioned verse his indignation. How 
finely conceived is the satire in these lines : 

" NetchaiefF is dead, your Majesty. 
You knew him not. He was a common hind, 
Who lived ten years in hell, and then he died — 
To seek another hell, as we must think. 
Since he was rebel to your Majesty." 

There are many startling lines in this 
poem, lines that would give our fairy- airy 
school of poets material for a dozen son- 
nets. "For the People" is another poem 
that shows the ink was not watered. It 
is full of truth, unpleasant to the ears of 
the well-fed and easy living, but truth 
nevertheless, painted with a bold and mas- 
terly hand. It is the critic's way to call 
poems of this kind passionate unreason- 
ableness, while an irregular ode to a cat 



82 JAMES JEFFKEY ROCHE. 

or a ballade of the shepherdess is filled 
with passionate reasonableness. All which 
proves that these amusing gentlemen are 
unconsciously sitting by the volcano's side. 
They have eyes and they see not; they 
have ears and they hear not. The pro- 
phetic voice of the poets who will sing 
from their inner seeing, caring not whether 
the age listens or hurries on, is lost on 
these so-called literary interpreters. The 
tocsin blast dies on the breeze, or speaks 
to a few lonely thinkers who catch its 
notes for future warning; the reed's soft 
sensuous music is hugged and repeated by 
the critics and the commonplace. When 
the lava tumbles forth, then the singer 
whose songs were a part of him, passion- 
ate, conceived in the white heat of truth, 
may have the diviner's crown. The critics 
and commonplace, in their suffering, re- 
member the warning in these burning 
lines : 



JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE. 83 

" There's a serf whose chains are of paper ; there's a 

king with a parchment crown, 
There are robber knights and brigands in factory, field 

and town ; 
But the vassal pays his tribute to a lord of wage 

rent ; 
And the baron's toll is Shylock's, with a flesh and blood 

per cent. 

"The seamstress bends to her labor all night in a 

narrow room, 
The child, defrauded of childhood, tiptoes all day at 

the loom, 
The soul must starve, for the body can barely on husks 

be fed ; 
And the loaded dice of a gambler settle the price of 

bread. 

" Ye have shorn and bound the Samson, and robbed 

him of learning's light ; 
But his sluggish brain is moving, his sinews have all 

their might. 
Look well to your gates of Gaza, your privilege, pride 

and caste ! 
The Giant is blind and thinking, and his locks are 

growing fast." 



84 JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE. 

"JSTetchaieif" and "For the People" are 
poems with a meaning. Their author is 
a thinker, a keen student of the social 
problems that convulse our every- day life. 
He walks the city's streets, and sees sights 
and hears ominous murmuring. He uses 
the poet's right to translate these scenes 
and sights into his own impassioned verse. 
This done, his duty done. The Creator 
must give brains to the reader. If that 
has been done, the poet's lines will fall 
fresh and thought-provoking on his ears. 
It will take him from Mittens, Marjorie's 
Kisses, April Maids and the school of fan- 
tastic littleness, to man's inhumanity to 
man, the burning wrong of our day. An 
Adirondack climb, but then the point of 
view repays the exertion. It is generally 
written that the author of Songs and Satires 
is a comic poet. A half-way truth is ex- 
pressed. If by comic is meant humor, 
yes ; all poets who are worth looking into 



JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE. 86 

have in a greater or less degree that pre- 
cious gift. It is a distinct gain if the 
author is an artist and knows how to use 
it, dangerous to the commonplace, who put 
it on with a white-wash brush. It is a 
nice line that divides humor from buf- 
foonery. Our author is a humorist of that 
school whose genius has been used to 
alleviate human suffering. Its shafts are 
not forged by the hammer of spleen on 
the anvil of malice', but the workmanship 
of love mourning for misery. His spirit 
is akin to Hood's. His touch is light, 
but his poniard is a Damascene blade 
well pointed. Cant has no foil to set it 
off. "A Concord Love Song" is a charm- 
ing bit of satire. I can well remember 
the effect it had on a teacher of mine, a 
proud sage of that school of word-twisting 
and transcendental gush. He sniffed and 
pawed viciously, a sure sign that the poet's 
dart was safely lodged in the bull's eye. 
7 



86 JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE. 

Those who have, as a sleep seducer, read 
some of the Concord fraternity's vapid 
musings on the pensive Here and the 
doubtful Yonder, will deliciously relish 
such lines as these: 

"Ah, the joyless fleeting 
Of our primal meeting, 
And the fateful greeting 

Of the How and Why ! 
Ah, the Thingness flying 
From the Hereness, sighing 
For a love undying 

That fain would die. 

"Ah, the Ifness sadd'ning. 
The Whichness madd'ning. 
And the But ungladd'ning 

That lie behind ! 
When the signless token 
Of love is broken 
In the speech unspoken, 

Of mind to mind." 

It is to his later and serious poems that 
the critic must go to find the poet at his 



JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE. 



87 



best. "At Sea" is a poem with a memory, 
inasmuch as it is the " embodiment of as 
beautiful a story of brotherly love as the 
world makes record." The poet's brother, 
Mr. John Roche, pay-clerk in the United 
States Navy, died a hero's death in the 
Samoan disaster of March, 1889. Doubt- 
less it was from this loved brother that 
the poet took his love for the sea, and the 
gallant deeds of our young navy. Here 
he is in his own field. " The Fight of the 
Armstrong Privateer" shows genuine in- 
spiration. It has color and passion. The 
reader feels the swing of the graphic lines 
and a quickness in his own blood, while 
the tale of daring rapidly and gracefully 
unfolds itself. 

James Jeffrey Roche was born at Mount 
Mellick, Queens county, Ireland, forty-six 
years ago. His father was a schoolmaster, 
and to him the poet is indebted for his 
early education. At a suitable age he 



88 JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE. 

entered St. Dunstan's College, Charlotte- 
town, Prince Edward's Island, the family 
having emigrated there in the poet's 
infancy. Here he finished his classics and 
showed his literary bent by the publishing 
of a college journal. Having the valedic- 
tory assigned to him, he hopelessly broke 
down. The present year he returned to 
St. Dunstan's the orator of Commence- 
ment day, as he wittily remarked, to finish 
the valedictory that had overtaxed his 
strength as a small boy. After leaving 
college the poet came to Boston, entered 
commercial life, remaining in that hardly 
genial business for sixteen years. During 
these years his pen was busy at the real 
vocation of his life. He was for several 
years the Boston correspondent of the 
Detroit Free Press, and had been long an 
editorial contributor to the Pilot, before 
he took the position of assistant editor on 
it, in 1883. As a journalist Mr. Roche 



JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE. 89 

has few equals. His keen mind easily 
grapples the questions of the day, while 
his good sense in their discussion never 
deserts him. In a few lines he goes to the 
core. If his trenchant sarcasm punctures 
the bubble, his humor will not fail to 
make it ridiculous. It is not the windy 
editorial in our day that tortures the 
quacks, but the bright, pointed dart of a 
paragraph. It is so easy to remember, 
may be stored in the reader's brain so 
readily, and used with deadly effect at any 
moment. A writer who knows him well 
has this to say: "As a journalist he 
combines two qualities not often found 
together, discretion and brilliancy. The 
former quality was well exemplified in his 
editorial course during the recent crisis 
in the history of the Irish National move- 
ment. He handles political topics ably, 
and in the treatment of the still broader 
social and economic questions, writes with 



90 JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE. 

the strength and spirit worthy of the asso- 
ciate and successor of that apostle of 
human liberty and human brotherhood, 
John Boyle O'Reilly." 

In truth, the one thing most essentially 
felt in this writer, whether in prose or 
poetry, is his sanity. There is no bun- 
combe in the former, no mawkishness 
nor pedantic prettiness in the latter. His 
genius has no pose. So much the better 
for his fame and future. Mr. Roche's 
prose works are: "The Story of the Fili- 
busters," a subject dear to a poet's heart, 
and the " Life of John Boyle O'Reilly," 
his chief and friend. This volume was the 
work of ten weeks, and that in the hours 
free from his editorial charge. It was a 
feat that few men could so successfully 
achieve. It had to be done. ISTo sacrifice 
was too great for Roche to make for his dead 
friend. That his health did not give way 
after the sleeplessness, work and worry of 



JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE. 91 

those ten weeks, is the wonder of those who 
stood near to him. Despite the limited 
time allowed to Mr. Roche, his biography 
shows few signs of haste. It is well and 
interestingly written, a lasting memorial 
and a deep tribute of affection to one of 
the most lovable characters of the century. 
O'Reilly rises from this book as he was. 
Friendship, while giving what was his due, 
restrains all aifections that might mar the 
truth of the portrait. His stature was felt 
to be large enough, without any additions 
that crumble to time. 

There are those of us who hope that the 
poet, with greater leisure, will give to 
O'Reilly's race a monograph to be treas- 
ured and read by each household, a mono- 
graph where the best in O'Reilly's char- 
acter shall be emphasized, and so lovingly 
set that those who read shall take heed 
and learn, while blessing him who gave 
the setting. The book as it is costs too 



92 JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE. 

much and is hardly compact enough for 
those who need the strong lessons of such 
a life as O'Reilly's. In a smaller compass 
and at less cost, done in that delightful 
way so thoroughly shown in his art of 
paragraphing, the little book would be a 
guide-post to many a struggling lad and 
lass. And to the young of our race must 
we look and to the exiled part for the full 
flowering. As the poet, so is the man, 
cheery, unaffected, kindly and man-loving. 
He has no airs, lacks the melodramatic of 
the airy-fairy school. He does not pre- 
tend that the gift of prophecy is his, nor 
hint that it sleeps amid verbal ingenui- 
ties. He has a song to sing, a tale to tell, 
and he does it with all the craft that is 
in him. In person Mr. Roche is of the 
medium height, well-built, rather dark 
complexioned, with abundant jet-black 
hair and brilliant hazel eyes. 

In concluding this sketch of a genuine 



JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE. 93 

man and true poet, I am tempted to quote 
the little poem he so graciously wrote in 
the fly-leaf of his " Songs and Satires : " 

" They chained her fair young body to the cold and 

cruel stone ; 
The beast begot of sea and slime had marked her for 

his own ; 
The callous world beheld the wrong, and left her there 

alone, 
Base caitiffs who belied her, false kinsmen who denied 

her, 

Ye left her there alone ! 

" My Beautiful, they left thee in thy peril and thy 
pain ; 

The night that hath no morrow was brooding on the 
main ; 

But lo ! a light is breaking, of hope for thee again ; 

'Tis Perseus' sword a-flaming, thy dawn of day pro- 
claiming. 

Across the Western main. 

O Ireland ! O my country ! he comes to break thy 
chain." 



94 GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP. 



GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP. 



In the footsore journey through Mexico, 
when dinner gladdened our vision, poor 
Read would solemnly remark, " dinners 
are reverent things." Society accepted this 
definition. I use society in the sense that 
Emerson would. " When one meets his 
mate," writes the Concord sage, " society 
begins." Read was mine, and to-day his 
quaint remark haunts me with melancholy 
force. Thoughts of a dinner with the sub- 
ject of this sketch, George Parsons Lathrop, 
and one whose fair and forceful life has 
been quenched, flit through my mind. It 
was but yesterday that I bade the gentle 
scholar farewell, unconsciously a long fare- 
well, for Azarias has fled from the haunts 
of mortality. 



GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP. 95 

" This is the burden of the heart, 
The burden that it always bore ; 
We live to love, we meet to part. 
And part to meet on earth no more." 

Colonel Johnson had read one of his 
charming essays. Brother Azarias and 
George Parsons Lathrop had listened with 
rapt attention to the most loveable writer 
of the 'New South. After the lecture I 
was asked to join them, for, as the author 
of Lucille asks, "where is the man that 
can live without dining?" That dinner, 
now that one lies dead, enters my memory 
as reverent and makes of Read's remark a 
truth. Men may or may not appear best 
at dinner. Circumstances lord over most 
dinners. As it was the only opportunity 
I had to snap my kodak, you must accept 
my picture or seek a better artist. Kodak- 
pictures, when taken by amateurs, are 
generally blurred. And now to mine. 

A man of medium height, strongly built, 



96 GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP. 

broad shouldered, the whole frame betoken- 
ing agility; face somewhat rounded giving 
it a pleasant plumpness, with eyes quick, 
nervous and snappy, lighting up a more 
than ordinary dark complexion — such is 
Parsons Lathrop, as caught by my camera. 
His voice was soft, clear as a bell-note, and, 
when heard in a lecture hall, charming ; a 
slight hesitancy but adds to the pleasure of 
the listener. In reading he affects none of 
the dramatic poses and Delsarte movements 
that makes unconscious comedians of our 
tragic-readers. It is pleasant to listen to 
such a man, having no fear that in some 
moving passage, carried away by some 
quasi-involuntary elocutionary movement, 
he might find himself a wreck among the 
audience. The lines of Wordsworth are 
an apt description of him : 

" Yet he was a man 
Whom no one could have passed without remark, 
Active and nervous was his gait ; his limbs, 
And his whole figure, breathed intelligence." 



GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP. 97 

Mr. Lathrop was born in Honolulu, 
Hawaiian Islands, August 23, 1851. It 
was a fit place for a poet's birthplace, 
" those gardens in perfect bloom, girded 
about with creaming waves." He came of 
Puritan stock, the founder of his family 
being the Rev. John Lathrop, a Separatist 
minister, who came to Massachusetts in 
1634. Some of his kinsmen have borne a 
noble part in the creation of an American 
literature, notably the historian of the 
Dutch and the genial autocrat, Wendell 
Holmes. His primary education was had 
in the public schools of JSfew York ; from 
thence he went to Dresden, Grermany, 
returning in 1870 to study law at Columbia 
College. Law was little to his liking. The 
dry and musty tomes, wherein is written 
some truth and not a little error, sanctioned 
by one generation of wiseacres to be whit- 
tled past recognition by another generation 
of the same species, could hardly hope to 



98 GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP. 

hold in thraldom a mind that had from 
boyhood browsed in the royal demesne of 
literature. Law and literature, despite the 
smart sayings of a few will not run in the 
same rut. In abandoning law for literature, 
he but followed the law of his being. What 
law lost literature gained. On a trip 
abroad a year later he met Rose Hawthorne, 
the second daughter of the great Nathaniel, 
wooed, and won her. This marriage was 
by far the happiest event in his life, the 
crowning glory of his manhood, a fountain 
of bliss to sustain his after life. Years 
later, in a little poem entitled, " Love that 
Lives," referring to the woman that was his 
all, he addresses her in words that needed 
no coaxing by the muses, but had long 
been distilled by his heart, ready for his 
pen to give them a setting and larger life. 

" Dear face — bright, glinting hair — 
Dear life, whose heart is mine — 
The thought of you is prayer. 
The love of you divine. 



GEOKGE PARSONS LATHROP. 99 

In starlight, or in rain ; 

In the sunset's shrouded glow ; 
Ever, with joy or pain, 

To you my quick thoughts go." 

And summing up, he tells us the kind of 
a bond that holds them. It is the 

" Love that lives ; ' 

Its spring-time blossoms blow 
'Mid the fruit that autumn gives ; 
And its life outlasts the snow." 

In 1875 he became assistant editor of 
that staid and stately magazine the Atlantic 
Monthly^ thereby adding to his fame, while 
it brought him into intimate relationship 
with the best current thought of the time. 
Few American literary men have not, at 
some time of their career, been closely 
allied with the press. Mr. Lathrop has 
been no exception. For two years, from 
'77 to '79, his brilliant pen guided the 
destinies of the Boston Courier. In 1879 
he purchased Hawthorne's old home, " The 



100 GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP. 

Wayside," in Concord, Mass., making it 
his home until his removal to New York 
in 1883. His present residence is at New 
London, Conn., where a beautiful home, 
with its every nook consecrated to books 
and paintings, tells of an ideal literary 
life and companionship. Mr. Lathrop's 
genius is many sided. This is often a sign 
of strength. Men, says a recent critic, 
with a great and vague sense of power in 
them are always doubtful whether they 
have reached the limits of that power, and 
naturally incline to test this in the field in 
which they feel they have fewer rather 
than more numerous auguries of success. 
Into many fields this brilliant writer has 
gone, and with success. In some he has 
sowed, in others reaped a golden harvest. 
He was a pioneer in that movement which 
rightfully held that an author had some- 
thing to do with his brain -work. It seems 
strange that in this nineteenth century such 



GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP. 101 

a proposition should demand a defender. 
Sanity, however, is not so widespread as 
the optimists tell. The contention of those 
that denied copyright was, "Ideas are 
common property." So they are, says our 
author, but granting this, don't think you 
ha^ve bagged your game ? How about the 
form in which those ideas are presented ? 
Is not the author's own work, wrought out 
with toil, sweat and privation — is not the 
labor bestowed upon that form as worthy 
of proper wage as the manual skill devoted 
to the making of a jumping jack ? Yet no 
one has denied that jumping-jacks must be 
paid for. This was sound reasoning and 
would have had immediate effect, had 
Congress possessed a ha'penny worth of 
logic. As it was, years were wasted agita- 
ting for a self-evident right, men's energies 
spent, and at length a half-loaf reluctantly 
given. 

In another field Mr. Lathrop has been a 
8 



102 GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP. 

worker almost single-hancled, that of en- 
couraging a school of American art. A 
few years ago a daub from France was 
valued more than a marvellous color-study 
of John La Farge, or a canvas breath- 
ing the luminous idealism of Waterman. 
Critics sniffed at American art, while they 
went into rhapsody over some foreign little 
master. Our author, whose keen percep- 
tion had taught him that the men who 
toiled in attics, without recompense in 
the present, and dreary prospects for the 
future, for the sake of art, were not to be 
branded as daubers, but as real artists, 
the fathers of American art, became their 
defender. He pointed out the beauties of 
this new school, its strength, and above 
all, that whatever it might have bor- 
rowed from foreign art, it was American 
in the core. Men listened more for the 
sake of the writer than interest in his 
theme. Gradually they became tolerant 



GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP. 103 

and admitted that there was such a thing 
as American art. 

It was natural that the son-in-law of 
America's greatest story-teller should try 
his strength in fiction. His first novels 
show a trace of Hawthorne. They are 
romantic, while the wealth of language 
bewilders. This, as a critic remarks, was 
an ''indication of opulence and not of 
poverty." The author was feeling his 
way. His later works bear no trace of 
Hawthorne ; they are marked by his own 
fine spiritual sense. The plots are in- 
genious, poetically conceived and worked 
out with a deftness and subtlety that 
charms the reader. There is an air of 
fineness about them totally foreign to the 
pyrotechnic displays of current American 
fiction. The author is an acute observer, 
one who looks below the surface, an ardent 
student of psychology. His English is 
scholarly, has color and dramatic force. 



104 GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP. 

His novels are free from immoral sug- 
gestions, straining after effect, overdoing 
the pathetic and incongruous padding, the 
ordinary stock of ovly fin de siecle novelists. 
The reading of them not only amuses, a 
primary condition of all works of fiction, 
but instructs and widens the reader's 
horizon on the side of the good and true. 
In poetry Mr. Lathrop has attained his 
greatest strength. Some of his war- poems 
are full of fine feeling and manly vigor. 
He is no carver of cherry-stones or singer 
of inane sonnets and meaningless ron- 
deaus, but a poet who has something to 
say ; none of your humanity messages, 
but songs that are human, songs that find 
root in the human heart. Of his volumes 
" Rose and Rooftree," " Dreams and Days," 
a critic writes : 

" There are poems in tenderer vein 
which appeal to many hearts, and others 
wrought out of the joys and sorrows of 



GEOEGE PARSONS LATHROP. 105 

the poet's own life, which draw hearts to 
him, as "May Rose" and the "Child's 
Wish Granted " and " The Flown Soul," 
the last two referring to his only son, 
whose death in early childhood has been 
the supreme grief of his life. The same 
critic notes the exquisite purity and deli- 
cacy of these poems, and that " in a day 
when the delusion is unfortunately wide- 
spread that these cannot co-exist with 
poetic fervor and strength.'' 

In March of 1891 Mr. Lathrop, after 
weary years of aimless wandering in the 
barren fields of sectarianism found, as 
Newman and Brownson had found, that 
peace which a warring world cannot give, 
in the bosom of the Catholic Church. 
Where Emerson halted, shackled by 
Puritanism and its traditional prejudice 
towards Catholicism, Lathrop, as Brown - 
son, in quest of new worlds of thought, 
critically examined the old church and her 



106 GEOEGE PARSONS LATHROP. 

teachings, finding therein the truth that 
makes men free. This step of Lathrop's, 
inexplicable to many of his friends, is 
explained in his own way, in the manly 
letter that concludes this sketch. Such a 
letter must, by its truthfulness, have held 
his friends. " May we not," says Kegan 
Paul, " carry with us loving and tender 
memories of men fi'om whom we learn 
much, even while we difi^er and criticise ? " 
" Humanly speaking, I entered into 
Catholicity as a result of long thought 
and meditation upon religion, continuing 
through a number of years. But there 
must have been a deeper force at work, 
that of the Holy Spirit, by means of what 
we call grace, for a longer time than I sus- 
pected. Certainly I was not attracted by 
'the fascinations of Rome,' that are so 
glibly talked about, but which no one has 
ever been able to define to me. Perhaps 
those that use the phrase refer to the out- 



GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP. 107 

ward symbols of ritual, that are simply the 
expressive adornment of the inner meaning 
— the flower of it. I, at any rate, never 
went to Mass but once with any comprehen- 
sion of it, before my conversion, and had 
seldom even witnessed Catholic services 
anywhere ; although now, with knowledge 
and experience, I recognize the Mass — 
which even that arch, unorthodox author, 
Thomas Carlyle, called ' the only genuine 
thing of our times ' — as the greatest action 
in the world. Many Catholics had been 
known to me, of varying merit ; and some 
of them were valued friends. But none of 
these ever urged or advised or even hinted 
that I should come into the Church. The 
best of them had (as large numbers of my 
fellow- Catholics have to-day) that same 
modesty and reverence toward the sacred 
mysteries that caused the early Christians 
also to be slow in leading catechumens — or 
those not yet fully prepared for belief — 



108 GEOEGE PAESONS LATHEOP. 

into the great truths of faith. My observa- 
tions of life, however, increasingly con- 
vinced me that a vital, central, unchanging 
principle in religion was necessary, together 
with one great association of Christians in 
place of endless divisions — if the promise 
made to men was to be fulfilled, or really 
had been fulfilled. When I began to ask 
questions, I found Catholics quite ready to 
answer everything with entire straight- 
forwardness, gentle good-will, yet firmness. 
Neither they nor the Church evaded any- 
thing. They presented and defended the 
teaching of Christ in its entirety, unex- 
aggerated and undiminished ; the complete 
faith, without haggling or qualification or 
that queer, loose assent to every sort of 
individual exception and denial that is 
allowed in other organizations. I may 
say here, too, that the Church, instead of 
being narrow or pitiless toward those not 
of her communion, as she is often mis- 



GEORGE PAESONS LATHROP. 109 

takenly said to be, is the most compre- 
hensive of all in her interpretation of 
God's mercy as well as of his justice. And, 
instead of slighting the Bible, she uses it 
more incessantly than any of the Protestant 
bodies ; at the same time shedding upon it 
a clear, deep light that is the only one that 
ever enabled me to see its full meaning and 
coherence. The fact is, those outside of the 
Church nowadays are engaged in talking 
so noisily and at such a rate, on their own 
hook, that they seldom pause to hear what 
the Church really says, or to understand 
what she is. Once convinced of the true 
faith, intellectually and spiritually, I could 
not let anything stand in the way of affirm- 
ing my loyalty to it." 



110 REV. BROTHER AZARIAS. 



REV. BROTHER AZARIAS. 



It is delicious in this age of hurried 
bookmaking, to run across a thinker. It 
gives one the same kind of sensation that 
comes to the sportsman, when a monarch 
of the glen crosses his path. Bookmakers 
are as many as leaves of the Adirondacks 
after the hasty gallop of a mountain storm ; 
thinkers are scarce. When, then, amid 
the leafy mass, one discovers the rare bird 
hiding from vulgar gaze, an irresistible 
desire to find his lurking place seizes the 
observer. This lurking place may be old 
to many ; it was only the other day that I 
discovered it, — when a friend placed in 
my hands " Phases of Thought and 
Criticism," by Brother Azarias. This book, 
the sale of which has been greater in 



REV. BROTHER AZARIAS. Ill 

England than on this side of the water, is 
one of suggestive criticism — a criticism 
founded on faith. The author holds with 
another thinker, that " Religion is man's 
first and deepest concern. To be indifferent 
is to be dull or depraved, and doubt is 
disease." Each chapter of his book ex- 
presses a distinct social and intellectual 
force. Each embodies a verifying ideal ; 
for, continues the author, "the criticism 
that busies itself with the literary form is 
superficial, for food it gives husks." 

While the author will not concede that 
mere literary form is the all in all that our 
modern masters claim, yet he would not 
be found in the ranks of M. de Bonniers, 
who declares that an author need not 
trouble himself about his grammar; let 
him have original ideas and a certain style, 
and the rest is of no consequence. The 
author of " Phases of Thought," believes 
first in the possession of ideas, for without 



112 EEV. BROTHER AZARIAS. 

them an author is a sorry spectacle. He 
also believes that an attractive style will 
materially aid in the diffusion of these 
ideas. Many good books fall still-born 
from the press, for no other reasons than 
their slovenly style. Readers now-a-days 
will not plod along poor roads, when a 
turnpike leads to the same destination. 
The grammar marks the parting of ways. 
Brother Azarias rightfully holds that good 
grammar is an essential part of every 
great writer's style. Classics are so, by 
correct grammar as well as by original 
ideas. This easy dictum of the slipshod 
writers — that if an idea takes you off your 
feet you must not trouble yourself about 
the grammar that wraps it, is but a spe- 
cious pleading for their ignorance of what 
they pretend to despise. 

The great difference between this book 
and the many on similar subjects is in the 
manner of treatment. It starts from a 



REV. BROTHER AZARIAS. 113 

solid basis; that basis the creed of the 
Catholic Church. The superstructure of 
lofty thought reared on this basis is in a 
style at once pellucid and crisp. The 
author is not only a thinker rare and 
original; he is a scholar broad and mas- 
terly. 

Believing that his Church holds the keys 
of the "kingdom come," and as a conse- 
quence, a key to all problems moral and 
social that can move modern society, he 
grapples with them, after the manner of a 
knight of old, courteously but convincingly. 
His teaching is that, outside the bosom 
of the Catholic Church jostle the warring 
elements of confusion and uncertainty. In 
her fold can man find that rest, that sweet 
peace promised by the Redeemer. Her 
philosophy is the wisdom worth cherishing, 
the curing balm that philosophers vainly 
seek outside her pale. To the weary and 
thought-stricken would this great writer 



114 REV. BROTHER AZARIAS. 

bring his often and beautifully taught les- 
son, that the things of this world are not the 
puppets of chance, nor lots of the panthe- 
istic whole, but parts of a well-ordered 
system, governed by a paternal being, 
whom we. His children, address in that 
touching prayer, " Father, who art in 
Heaven.'' From that Father came a Son, 
not mere man, not only a great prophet, 
not only a law-giver, but the true Son of 
God, equal to the Father, from all eternity, 
whose mission was, to teach all men that 
would listen, the way that leads to light. 
That this identical mission is, and will be 
continued to the consummation of the ages 
by the Catholic Church. That in the 
truth of these things, all men, who lovingly 
seek, will be confirmed, not that mere 
intellect alone could be the harbinger of 
such truths, for, as he has so well put 
it: — "Human reason and human know- 
ledge, whether considered individually or 



REV. BROTHER A Z ARIAS. 115 

collectively in the race are limited to the 
natural. Knowledge of the supernatural 
can come only from a Divine Teacher." 

One may be convinced of every truth of 
revealed religion, and yet not possess the 
gift of faith. That gift is purely gratui- 
tous. If, however, the seeker humbly and 
honestly desires the acquisition of these 
truths, and knocks, the door of the chamber 
of truth shall be opened unto him, for this 
has the Saviour promised. That door once 
opened, the Spirit of God breathes on the 
seeker, it opens the eyes of the soul, it 
reveals beyond all power of doubt or cavil, 
or contradiction, the supernatural as a fact, 
solemn, universal, constant throughout the 
vicissitudes of the age. While the author 
fashions these lofty truths on the anvil 
of modern scholarship, the reader finds 
himself, like the school children, in 
Longfellow's poem, looking in through 
the artist's open door full of admiration, 



116 REV. BROTHER AZARIAS. 

fascinated by burning sparks. Pages have 
been written about the ideal, defining it, in 
verbiage fatiguing and elusive. 

It is a trick of pretended scholarship, to 
hide thought with massive word-boulders. 
What a difference in the process of this 
rare scholar ? 

A flying spark from his anvil lights up 
the dullest intellect. It is a stimulus to 
the weary brain, after wading through 
essays as to what constitutes an ideal, to 
have the gentle scholar, across the blazing- 
pine logs, on a winter's night, say : " A 
genius conceives and expresses a great 
thought. The conception so expressed 
delights. It enters men's souls ; it compels 
their admiration. They applaud and are 
rejoiced that another masterpiece has been 
brought into existence to grace the world 
of art and letters. The genius alone is 
dissatisfied. Where others see perfection, 
he perceives something unexpressed ; be- 



EEV. BROTHER AZARIAS. 117 

yoncl the reach of his art. Try as best he 
may, he cannot attain that indefinable 
something. Deep in his inner conscious- 
ness he sees a type so grand and perfect 
that his beautiful production appears to 
him but a faint and marred copy of that 
original. That original is the ideal ; and 
the ideal it is that appeals to the aesthetic 
and calls forth men's admiration." What 
a divining power has this student, in 
plummeting the vagaries of modern cul- 
ture! 

" Every school of philosophy has its dis- 
ciples, who repeat the sayings of their 
masters with implicit confidence, without 
ever stopping to question the principles 
from which those sayings arise or the 
results to which they lead." These chat- 
tering disciples will afi*ect to sneer at the 
Christian belief, while they lowly sit at 
the feet of one of their mud gods singing 
"thou art the infallible one." They will 
9^ 



118 REV. BROTHER AZARIAS. 

not question their position simply because 
"these systems are accepted not so much 
for truth's sake as because they are the 
intellectual fashions of the day." Such men 
change their philosophy as quickly as a 
Parisian dressmaker his styles. It may 
yet be shown by some mighty Teuton 
that vagaries in philosophy and dress are 
closely allied, and that the synthetic phi- 
losophy of Herbert Spencer is responsible 
for the coming of crinoline. What a de- 
lightful thrust at that school of criticism 
that singles out an author or a book as 
the very acme of perfection, seeing wisdom 
in absurdities and truth in commonplace 
fiction, is given in these lines : " Paint a 
daub and call it a Turner, and forthwith 
these critics will trace in it strokes of 
genius." With a twinkle in his eye he 
asks, "Think you they understand the real 
principles of art criticism?" You will be 
easily able to answer that question when 



REV. BROTHER AZARIAS. 119 

you have mastered this pithy definition 
of true criticism, be it of literature or of 
art, " that it is all-embracing." It has 
no antagonism to science so long as she 
travels in her rightful domain. When 
" science has her superstitions and her 
romancings as unreal and shadowy as 
those of the most ephemeral literature, 
then it is the duty of criticism to adminis- 
ter the medicine of truth and purge the 
wayward jade of her humors." 

To such a mind as that of the author 
of "Phases of Thought," with its thorough 
knowledge of the art of criticism and its 
perfect equipment, the separating of the 
chaff from the meal of an author becomes 
not only a pleasure but a duty. This is 
best seen by a perusal of Chapter III, 
dealing with Emerson and Newman as 
types. With a few masterly strokes the 
real Emerson, not the phantom or brain 
figment of Burroughs and Woodberry and 



120 REV. BROTHER AZARIAS. 

the long line of fad disciples, passes before 
us. Not an inch is taken from his stature. 
His intellectual beauties and defects, so 
strongly drawn, but confirm the reader in 
the truth of the portraiture. One catches 
not only a glimpse of the man, but the 
springs of his soul-struggles. Emerson 
in his hungry quest for intellectual food, 
ranged through the philosophies of the 
east and west, purposely ignoring that of 
the Catholic Church, This sin cost him 
whole worlds of thought hidden from his 
vision. Newman had the same hunger to 
aj^pease, but where Emerson turned away 
Newman, ever in search for truth, kept 
on, and found it in the Catholic Church. 
The analysis of these two minds is done in 
a masterly way. Azarias has no preju- 
dices. If he puts his fingers on defects 
and descants on their nature and treat- 
ment, he will, no less, point out beauties 
and lovingly linger among them. He is a 



KEV. BROTHER AZARIAS. 121 

knight in the cause of truth, and would 
not herd with the carping critics. He will 
tell you that Emerson's mind was like an 
^olian harp. " It was awake to the most 
delicate impressions, and at every breath 
of thought it gave out a music all its own," 
and that the reading of him with under- 
standing "is a mental tonic bracing for 
the cultured intellect as is Alpine air 
for the mountaineer." The pages of this 
book teem with thought clothed in lan- 
guage whose sparkling beauty is all the 
author's own. From such a book it is 
difficult to select. Emerson has well said, 
" No one can select the beautiful passages 
of another for you. Do your own quarry- 
ing." I abide by this quotation, and should 
ask every lover of the beautiful and true 
to buy this fecund book. 

Patrick Francis Mullaney, better known 
as Brother Azarias, was born in Kil- 
lenaule County, Tipperary, Ireland, June 



122 EEV. BROTHEB AZARIAS. 

29th, 1847. Like the majority of eminent 
men that his country has given birth to, 
he came of its noble peasantry. The old 
tale was here enacted. The parents left 
the land of their birth in search of a home 
in our better land. This found, Azarias 
joined them. At the age of fifteen he 
joined the Christian Brothers. That great 
Order gave free scope to his fine abilities. 
In 1866 he was chosen professor of mathe- 
matics and English literature at Rock Hill 
College, Maryland. He continued in this 
position for ten years. At the expiration 
of his professorship he travelled a year 
through Europe, collecting materials and 
writing his "Development of Old English 
Thought." On his return he became presi- 
dent of Rock Hill College, holding that 
position until recalled to Paris by his 
Superior in 1866. After an absence of 
three years Brother Azarias returned to 
the States as professor of English litera- 



BEV. BROTHER AZARIA8. 123 

ture at the De La Salle Institute, New 
York. This is not only an important posi- 
tion, but it gives leisure, and that ready 
access to the great libraries, so prized by 
literary men. 



.WOMEN. 



KATHERINE ELEANOR CONWAY. 



" ISText room to that of Roche's," said 
the dear O'Reilly, showing me his nest of 
poets, "is a gentle poetess." 

The door was wide open. It is a ques- 
tion with my mind if the room ever 
knew a door. Be this as it may, there 
sat, with her chair close drawn to her 
desk, a frail, delicate-looking woman. 
The ordinary eye might see nothing in a 
face that was winsome, if not handsome ; 
yet, let the dainty mouth curve in 
speech, and at once a subtle attraction, 
lit up by lustrous eyes, permeated the 
face. One characteristic that made itself 
felt, in the most sparse conversation with 
this woman, was her humility, a rare 
virtue among American literary women. 

127 



128 KATHERINE ELEANOR CONWAY. 

I have known not a few among that 
irritable class who, no sooner had they 
sipped the most meagre draught of fame, 
than they became intoxicated with their 
own importance, and for the balance of 
life wooed that meretricious goddess, No- 
toriety. In fiery prose and tuneful song 
they told of the dire misfortunes that 
had been heaped upon their sex by that 
obstinate vulgar biped, man. Their litera- 
ture — for that is the name given to 
the crudest offspring of the press in 
these days — is noisy, and, says a witty 
writer, a noisy author is as bad as a 
barrel organ, — a quiet one is as refresh- 
ing as a long pause in a foolish sermon. 
Clergymen, who have listened to a brother 
divine on grace, will be the first to see 
the point. Our authoress— (a female filled 
with the vanity that troubled Solomon 
says I should write female author) — is a 
quiet and unobtrusive writer. Of the 



KATHERINE ELEANOR CONWAY. 129 

tricks that catch and the ways that are 
crooked in literature, she knows nothing, 
and what is better, no amount of tawdry 
fame could induce her to swerve a jot from 
the hard stony road that leads to enduring- 
success, the only goal worth striving for 
in the domain of letters. I am well aware 
that in the popular list of women-writers 
mouthed by the growing herd of flippant 
readers that have no other use for a book 
than as a time-killer, — a herd to whom 
ideas are as unpalatable as disestablish- 
ment to an English parson — you will fail 
to find the name of Katherine Conway. 
The reason is simple. She has no fads to 
air in ungrammatical English, no fallacies 
to adduce in halting metre. It was a 
Boston critic who echoed the dictum of the 
French critic — that grammar has no place 
in the world of letters. Only have ideas, 
that is, write meaningless platitudes, gran- 
diose nothings, something that neither 



130 KATHERINE ELEANOR CONWAY. 

man, the angels above nor the demons 
down under the sea, may decipher, and 
this illusive verbiage will make you famous. 
A school of critics will herald your work 
with such adjectives as " noble, lofty, ab- 
sorbing, soul-inspiring ; " nay, more, a 
pious missionary friend may be found to 
to translate the verbiage into Syriac, as a 
present for converts. Borne on the tide of 
such criticism, not a few women writers 
have mistaken the plaudits of notoriety, 
that passing show, for fame. It was a 
saying of De Musset's that fame was a 
tardy plant, a lover of the soil. Be this 
as it may, it is safe to assert that its coming 
is not proclaimed by far-fetched similes, 
frantic metaphors, sensuous images, ranting 
style, ignorance of metre, want of gram- 
mar ; the dishes are not of the voluptuous, 
morbid or the monstrous kind. Its thirst 
is not slaked at sewers of dulness spiced 
with immorality. These symptoms savor 



KATHERINE ELEANOR CONWAY. 131 

of one disease known to all pathologists as 
notoriety. In an age of this dreaded 
disease it is surely refreshing to meet with 
works that breathe gentleness and repose, 
— a beautiful trust in religion, and a warm, 
natural heart for humanity. These traits 
will the reader find in abundance in the 
pages of Katherine Conway. " What kills 
a poet," says Aldrich, " is self-conceit." Of 
all the forms self-conceit may assume none 
is more foolish or detrimental, especially 
to a woman-poet, than the pluming of 
oneself as the harbinger of some renova- 
ting gospel, some panacea for human in- 
firmities. What is the burden of your 
message ? says the critic to the young poet. 
Straightway the poet evolves a message, 
and as messages of this kind ought to be 
mysterious, the poet wraps them in a jar- 
gon as unintelligible as Garner's monkey 
dialect. Thus in America has risen a 
school of woman poetry, deluded by false 



132 KATHERINE ELEANOR CONWAY. 

criticism, calling itself a message to hu- 
manity, dubbed rightly the school of 
passion, and one might add, of pain. This 
school may ask, " Am I to be debarred 
from treating of the passions on the score 
of sex." By no means ; the passions are 
legitimate subjects. Love, one of them, is 
your most attractive theme, but as Lilly 
has it, love is not to you what it is to the 
physiologist, a mere animal impulse which 
man has in common with moths and 
molluscs. Your task is to extract from 
human life, even in its commonest aspects, 
its most vulgar realities, what it contains of 
secret beauty ; to lift it the level of art, not 
to degrade art to its level. Few Ameri- 
can writers more fully realized these great 
artistic truths than the master under 
whose fatherly tuition Miss Conway had 
long been placed. Boyle O'Reilly was a 
Grecian in his love for nature. As such it 
was his aim to seek the beautiful in its com- 



KATHERINE ELEANOK CONWAY. 133 

monest aspects, its most vulgar realities. 
JSTo amount of claptrap or fine writing 
could make him mistake a daub for a 
Turner. In the bottom of his soul he 
detested the little bardlings who had 
passed nature by, without knowing her, 
who wove into the warp and woof of 
their dulness the putridity of Zola and 
morbidity of Marie Bashkirtseif. Under 
such a guide, the poetic ideal set before 
Miss Conway has been of the highest, 
and the highest is only worth working 
for. This ideal must be held unswerv- 
ingly, even if one sees that books that 
are originally vicious are "placarded 
in the booksellers' windows ; sold on the 
street corners ; hawked through the rail- 
road trains ; yea, given away, with pack- 
ages of tea or toilet soap, in place. of the 
chromo, mercifully put on the superan- 
nuated list." These books are but foam 
upon the current of time, flecking its sur- 
10 



134 KATHERINE ELEANOR CONWAY. 

face for a moment, and passing away into 
oblivion, while what Miss Conway happily 
calls the literature of moral loveliness, or 
what might as aptly be called the litera- 
ture of all time, remains our contribution 
to posterity. Its foundations, to follow the 
thought of Azarias, are deeply laid in 
human nature, and its structure withstands 
the storms of adversity and the eddies of 
events. For such a literature O'Reilly 
made a life struggle ; his pupil has closely 
followed his footsteps in the charming, 
simple, melodious volume that lies before 
me, " A Dream of Lilies." Rarely has a 
Catholic book had a more artistic setting, 
and one might add, rarely has a volume of 
Catholic verse deserved it more. Here the 
poetess touches her highest point, and 
proves that years of silence have been 
years of study and conscientious workman- 
ship. In her poem "Success" may be 
found the key to this volume ; 



KATHERINE ELEANOR CONWAY. 135 

" Ah ! know what true success is ; young hearts dream, 
Dream nobly and plan loftily, nor deem 
That length of years is length of living. See 
A whole life's labor in an hour is done ; 
Not by world -tests the heavenly crown is won , 
To God the man is what he means to be." 

^' Dream nobly and plan loftily" has 
been the guiding spirit of this volume. 
It is a book of religious verse in the true 
sense, not in the general acceptance of 
modern religious verse, which is gener- 
ally dull twaddle, egotism, mawkishness, 
blind gropings and haunting fears. The 
gentle spirit of Christ breathes through 
it, making an atmosphere of peace and 
repose. There is no bigotry to jar, no 
narrowness to chafe us, but the broad 
upland of Christian charity and truth. 
Nor has our author forgotten that even 
truth if cast in awkward mould may 
be passed over. To her poems she has 
given a dainty setting without sacrificing 



136 KATHERINE ELEANOR CONWAY. 

a jot of their strength. After reading 
such a book a judicious bit of Miss Con- 
way's prose comes to my mind. "And as 
that Catholic light, the only true vision, 
brightens about us, we realize more and 
more that literary genius, take it all and 
all, has done more to attract men to good 
than to seduce men to evil ; that the best 
literature is also the most fascinating, and 
even by its very abundance is more than 
a match for the bad ; that time is its best 
ally ; that it is hard, if not impossible, 
to corrupt the once formed pure literary 
taste ; and, finally, that as makers of litera- 
ture or critics or disseminators of it, it is 
our duty to believe in the best, hope in the 
best, and steadfastly appeal to the best in 
human nature; for we needs must love the 
highest when we see it." 

Katherine Eleanor Conway was born of 
Irish parents, in Rochester, on the 6th of 
Sept., 1853. Her early studies were made 



KATHERINE ELEANOR CONWAY. 137 

in the convent schools of her native city. 
From an early age she had whisperings of 
the muse. These whisperings at the age of 
fifteen convinced her that her true sphere 
of action was literature. In 1875 she 
commenced the publication of a modest 
little Catholic monthly, contributing poems 
and moral tales, under the nom-de-plume of 
" Mercedes," to other Catholic journals, in 
the spare hours left from editing her little 
venture and teaching in the convent. In 
1878 she became attached to the Buifalo 
Union and Times. To this journal she con- 
tributed the most of the poems to be found 
in her maiden volume, — " On the Sunrise 
Slope," — a volume whose rich promise has 
been amply fulfilled in the "Dream of 
Lilies." Her health failing, she sought a 
needful rest in Boston. Her fame had 
preceded her, and the gifted editor of the 
Pilots ever on the lookout for a hopeful 
literary aspirant of his race, held out a 



138 KATHERINE ELEANOR CONWAY. 

willing hand to the shy stranger. " Come 
to us," he said, in a voice that knew no 
guile, " and help us in the good fight." 
That fight — the crowning glory of O'Reilly's 
noble life — was to gain an adequate position 
for his race and religion from the puritan - 
ism of Xew England. How that race and 
religion were held before his coming, may 
be best told in the language of Miss 
Conway, taken from a heart-sketch of her 
dead master and minstrel : — 

" Notwithstanding Matignon and Cheve- 
rus, and the Protestant Governor Sullivan, 
Catholic and Irish were, from the outset, 
simply interchangeable terms — and terms of 
odium both — in the popular JN'ew England 
mind; in vain the bond of a common lan- 
guage, in vain the Irishman's prompt and 
affectionate acceptance of the duties of 
American citizenship. To but slight soft- 
ening of prejudice even his sacrifice of blood 
and life on every battle-field in the Civil 



KATHERINE ELEANOR CONWAY. 139 

War, in proof of the sincerity of his politi- 
cal profession of faith. He and his were 
still hounded as a class inferior and apart. 
They were almost unknown in the social 
and literary life of New England. Their 
pathetic sacrifices for their kin beyond the 
sea, their interest in the political fortunes 
of the old land, were jests and by-words. 
Their religion was the superstition of the 
ignorant, vulgar and pusillanimous ; or, at 
best, motive for jealous suspicion of divided 
political allegiance and threatened "for- 
eign " domination. Their children suffered 
petty persecutions in the public schools. 
The stage and the press faithfully reflected 
the ruling popular sentiment in their cari- 
catures of the Catholic Irishman." 

She accepted O'Reilly's call and stood 
by his side with Roche, Guiney, Blake, 
until the hard fought battle against the 
prejudice to Irishism and Catholicism, 
planted in New England by the bigoted 



140 KATHERINE ELEANOR CONWAY. 

literature of Old England, was abated, if 
not destroyed ; until its shadows, if cast 
now, are cast by the lower rather than 
the higher orders in the world of intellect 
and refinement. " And the shortening of 
the shadow is proof that the sun is rising," 
proof that her work has been far from 
vain. And when from the grey dawn of 
prejudice will come forth the white morrow 
of charity and truth, the singer and her 
songs will not be forgotten. 



LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY. 



In speaking with the author of a " Dream 
of Lilies," I casually mentioned the name 
of another Boston poetess, "one of the Pilot 
poets," as the gifted Carpenter was wont to 
speak of those whose genius was nursed by 
Boyle O'Reilly. For a few years previous 



LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY. 141 

to my coming, little waif poems, suggestive 
of talent and refinement, had seen light 
in the columns of that brilliant journal. 
They had about them that something which 
makes the reader hazard a bet that the 
youngster when fully fledged would some 
day leave the lowlands of minor minstrelsy 
for a height on Parnassus. From this 
singer Miss Conway had that morning 
received a notelet. It was none of the 
ordinary kind, a little anarchistic, if one 
might judge from the awkward pen-sketch 
of a hideous grinning skeleton-skull held 
by cross-bones which served as an illustra- 
tion to the bantering text that followed, in 
a rather cramped girlish hand. The note- 
let was signed Louise Imogen Guiney. 

"Are you not afraid, Miss Conway," said 
I, "to receive such warning notes?" "It 
is from the best girl in America," was the 
frank reply ; ' ' read it . " A perusal of the few 
dashing lines was enough, and my gener- 



142 LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY. 

ous host, reading my eyes, gave me the 
coveted notelet. That notelet begot an 
interest in the writer ; an interest fully 
repaid by the strong, careful work put 
forth under her name. Louise Imogen 
Guiney, poet, essayist, dramatist, was born 
in Boston, that city of " sweetness and 
light," in January, 1862. Her parents 
were Irish. Her father, Patrick Guiney, 
came from the hamlet of Parkstown, 
County Tipperary, at an early age. He 
was a man of the most blameless and 
noble character. During the civil war, 
as Col. Guiney of the Irish Ninth Massa- 
chusetts Volunteers, his heroism on behalf 
of his adojDted country won him the grate- 
ful admiration of all lovers of fi-eedom. 
This admiration at the close of the war 
was substantially shown by his election as 
Judge of Probate. Constant suffering from 
an old wound, received at the battle of the 
Wilderness, gave the old soldier but few 



LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY. 143 

years to enjoy honors from his fellow-citi- 
zens. His death was mourned by all who 
loved virtue and honor. Of him a Boston 
poet sang : 

" Large heart and brave ! Tried soul and true ! 

How thickly in thy life's short span, 
All strong sweet virtues throve and grew, 

As friend, as hero, and as man. 
Unmoved by thought of blame or praise, 

Unbought by gifts of power and pride. 
Thy feet still trod Time's devious ways 

With Duty as thy law and guide." 

Good blood, you will say, from whence 
our poet came, and blood counts even in 
poetry. I have no anecdotes to relate of 
Miss Guiney's early years. I am not 
sure that there were any. Anecdotes are 
usually manufactured in later life, if the 
subject happens to become famous. Her 
education was carefully planned, and in- 
telligently carried out. She was not held 
in the dull routine of the school-room, but 



144 LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY. 

was allowed to emancipate herself in the 
works of the poets. What joy must have 
been her's, scampering home after the 
study of de omni scibili, the ordinary curri- 
culum of any American school, to a quiet 
nook and the dream of her poets. Amid 
these dreams came the siren whisperings 
of the muse, telling her of the poet within 
struggling for life and expression. These 
struggles begot a tiny little volume happily 
named "Songs at the Start." The great 
American reviewer, who, ordinarily, 

" Bolts every book that comes out of the press, 
Without the least question of larger or less," 

on this occasion, by some untoward event, 
stumbled on a truth when he informed us, 
with the air of one who rarely touches 
earth, that the book bore signs of promise. 
The people, by all means a better critic, 
were more apt in their judgment of the 
young singer. A few years later they 



LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY. 



145 



asked her to write the memorial poem for 
the services in commemoration of General 
Grant. Thus honored by her native city, 
in an easy way she was led to climb the 
ladder of fame. In 1885 appeared her first 
volume of essays, " Goose Quill Papers ; " 
in 1887 a volume of poems bearing the 
fanciful name of " White- Sail ; " in 1888 a 
pretty book for children ; in 1892 '' Mon- 
sieur Henri, a Foot-note to French His- 
tory." It is something to be noted in 
regard to a " Foot-note to French history," 
that the novelist Stevenson, in his far-off 
home in Samoa, was publishing at the 
same time a work which bore a decided 
likeness to her title. Stevenson's book was 
published as "A Foot-Note to History." 
In 1893 appeared her latest volume of 
verse, being a selection of poems previously 
published in American magazines. This 
selection (the poet has a genuine knack 
for tacking taking names to her volumes) 



146 LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY. 

is quaintly named "A Wayside Harp," 
and dedicated to a brace of Irish poets, the 
Sigerson sisters. The graceful dedication 
as well as many of its strongest and most 
artistic poems, were the outcome of a trip 
to Grreat Britain and Ireland. The author 
travelled with open eyes, and brought back 
many a dainty picture of the scenes she 
had so lovingly witnessed. This volume 
fulfils the early promise, and what is more, 
gives indubitable signs that the poet pos- 
sesses a reserve force. Not a few women 
poets write themselves out in their first 
volume. Not so with Miss Guiney, every 
additional volume shows greater strength 
and more complete mastery of technique. 
After the surfeit of twaddle passing cur- 
rent as poetry, such a book as "A Wayside 
Harp " should find a waiting audience, 
Miss Gruiney has the essentials of a poet, 
which I take to be color, music, perfume 
and passion. In their use she is an artist. 



LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY. 147 

In her first book an excess of these every- 
where prevailed; it was from this excess, 
however, that the prudent critic would 
have hazarded a doubt as to her fitness 
to join the company of the bards. Since 
then she has been an ardent student. 
This study has not only taught her limita- 
tions, a thing that saves so much after 
pruning, but that other lesson, forgotten 
by so many bardlets, that the greatest 
poetic effects are the result of the master- 
ful mixing of a few simple colors. It is 
well that she has learned these lessons at 
the outset of her career. Let not the fads 
and fancies of this Jin de siecle and the 
senseless worship of those poetasters who 
scorn sense while they hug sound lead her 
from the true road of song. No amount of 
meaningless words airily strung together, 
no amount of gymnastic rhyming feats can 
produce a poet. They are the badges of 
those wondrous little dunces that pass 



148 LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY. 

nature with a frown, alleging in the lan- 
guage of the witty Bangs that " Nature 
is not art." Guiney's friend and faithful 
mentor, O'Reilly, had taught her to abhor 
all those who spent their waking hours 
chiselling cherry stones. To him it was a 
poet's duty to aim high, attune his lyre, 
not to the petty, but the manly and hope- 
ful ; never to debase the lyre by an utter- 
ance of selfishness, but to consecrate it 
with the strains of liberty and humanity. 
If Guiney follows the teachings of her 
early friend — ^teachings which are substan- 
tially sound, she will yet produce poems 
that the world will not willingly let die. 
That Rosetti fad of hiding a mystic mean- 
ing in a poem, now occupying the brains 
of our teeming songsters, is now and then 
to be met with in our poet. It is a trade- 
trick. Poetry is sense — common-sense at 
that, and you cannot rim common-sense 
things with mystical hues. Abjuring these 



LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY. 149 

trade-tricks, and shaking off the trammels 
of her curious and extensive reading and 
evolving from herself solely, she has, says 
Douglas Sladen, a great promise before 
her. As an instance of this promise let us 
quote that fine poem, "The Wild Ride," 
which is full of genuine inspiration, and 
which may be the means of introducing to 
some the most thoroughly gifted Catholic 
woman writer of our country. 

The Wild Kide. 

I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses, 

All day, the commotion of sinewy mane-tossing horses ; 

All night from their cells the importunate tramping 

and neighing. 
Cowards and laggards fall back but alert to the saddle. 
Straight, grim, and abreast, vault our weather-worn 

galloping legion. 
With a stirrup cup each to the one gracious woman 

that loves him. 
The road is thro' dolour and dread, over crags and 

morasses ! 
11 



160 LOtJISE IMOGEN GUINEY. 

There are shapes by the way, there are things that 

appall or entice us ! 
What odds! We are knights, and our souls are but 

bent on the riding ! 
I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses, 
All day, the commotion of sinewy, mane-tossing horses ; 
All night from their cells the importunate tramping 

and neighing. 
We spur to a land of no name, outracing the storm 

wind; 
We leap to the infinite dark, like the sparks from the 

anvil. 
Thou leadest! O God! All's well with thy troopers 

that follow. 

It was only natural that the daughter of 
an Irish patriot should sing of her father's 
land, and that in a style racy of that land. 
It was a hazardous experiment, as many 
an Irish American singer has learned in 
sorrow. That Miss Guiney has come out 
of the trying ordeal successfully, may be 
seen in the following little snatch, full of 
the aroma of green Erin : 



LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY. 151 

An Ikish Peasant Song. 

I try to knead and spin, but my life is low the while ; 
Oh, I long to be alone, and walk abroad a mile; 
Yet when I walk alone, and think of naught at all, 
Why from me that's young should the wild tears fall ? 

The shower-stricken earth, the earth-colored streams. 
They breathe on me awake, and moan to me in dreams ; 
And yonder ivy fondling the broken castle wall. 
It pulls my heart, till the wild tears fall. 

The cabin-door looks down a furze-lighted hill, 
And far as Leighlin cross the fields are green and still ; 
But once I hear a blackbird in Leighlin hedges call, 
The foolishness is on me, and the wild tears fall ! 

Miss Guiney possesses a charming per- 
sonality. Her manner is " unaffected, girl- 
ish and modest." There is about her none 
of the curtness and prudishness of the 
blue-stocking. Success has not turned her 
head, literary homage has not made her 
forget that they who will build for time 
must need work long and patiently, using 
only the best material. By so doing may 



152 MES. BLAKE. 

it be written of her work, as she has 
written of Brother Bartholomew's: 

" Wonderful verses ! fair and fine, 
Rich in the old Greek loveliness ; ' 
The seer-like vision, half divine ; 
Pathos and merriment in excess, 
And every perfect stanza told. 
Of love and of labor manifold." 



MRS. BLAKE. 



Boston is a charming city. It is the 
whim of the passing hour to sneer at the 
modest dame. Henry James has done so. 
Is not the author of "Daisy Miller" and 
other interminable novels a correct person 
to follow ? The disciples of the Mutual Ad- 
miration Society in American Letters will 
vociferously answer "yes." Old-fashioned 
people may have another way. Scattered 



MRS. BLAKE. 153 

here and there possibly a few there are 
who hold that Hawthorne was a better 
novelist than Howells is, that Holmes' 
poetry is as good as Boyesen's, and that 
Emerson's criticisms are more illuminative 
than James'. Be this as it may, Boston is 
a charming place to all those who had the 
good fortune to have been welcomed by its 
warm-hearted citizen, Boyle O'Reilly. To 
those who knew his struggles, and the 
earnest striving, until his weary spirit 
sought its final home, for Catholic literature 
in its true sense, the charm but increases. 
It was owing to his kindness that I 
found myself one blustery, raw day, ring- 
ing the door-bell of an ordinary well to-do 
brick house. Houses now and then carry 
on their fronts an inkling of their occu- 
pants. A door was opened, my card handed 
to a feminine hand ; the aperture was not 
as yet wide enough to catch a glimpse of 
the face. The card was a power. " Come 



164 MRS. BLAKE. 

in/' said a woman's voice, and the door 
was wide open. I followed the guide, and 
was soon in a plain, well furnished room, 
in presence of a motherly-looking woman. 
She was knitting ; at least that is part of 
my memory's picture. Near her hung a 
mocking-bird, whose notes now and then 
were peculiarly sad. Despite the graceful 
lines of the Cavalier Lovelace, iron bars 
do a prison make for bird and man. And 
the songs sung behind these bars are but 
bits of the crushed-out life. I was wel- 
comed, and during busy years have held 
the remembrance of that visit with its 
hour of desultory chat and a mocking- 
bird's broken song. The motherly-look- 
ing woman, with her strong Celtic face 
freshly furrowed by sorrow in the loss of 
beloved children, was a charming talker 
and a good listener, things rarely found 
in your gentle or fiery poetess. She had 
just published, under the initials M. A. B., 



MEJS. BLAKE. 155 

a volume of children's verse, and, as is 
natural with an author who had finished 
a piece of work, was full of it. The pre- 
tense of some authors that they are bored 
to speak of their own books is a sly sug- 
gestion to praise them for their humility. 
Mrs. Blake — for that is the motherly-look- 
ing woman's name — spoke of her work 
without any hiccoughing gush or false 
modesty. Her eyes lit up, and the ob- 
server read in them honesty. She was 
deeply interested, as all thinking women 
must be, in the solution of the social 
problems that have arisen in our times, 
and will not be downed at the biddance of 
capitalist or demagogue. With her clear- 
cut intellect she was able to grasp a salient 
point, purposely hidden by the swarm of 
curists with their panacea remedies, that 
these problems must be solved in the light 
of religion. Man must return to Christ, not 



156 MES. BLAKE. 

the "cautious, statistical Christ " paraded 
in the social show, not 

" The meteor blaze 
That soon must fail, and leave the wanderer blind, 
More dark and helpless far, than if it ne'er had shined," 

but the Christ of the Gospels, the Bringer 
of peace and good-will — the Bearer of 
burdens, the soul-guider — Christ, loving 
and acting, as found in the Catholic Church. 
Hecker had begun the preface of his won- 
derful book with a truth, " The age is out 
of joint." Problems to be solved, and 
lying around them millions of broken 
hearts. " The age is out of joint." Who 
will bring the light and rightify the age ? 
Mrs, Blake has but one answer. Bring 
the employers and the employed nearer 
the Christ of the Catholic Church. This 
was O'Reilly's often expressed and worked- 
for idea. It is the key-note of much of his 
poetry. It is the germ of his " Bohemia." 



MRS. BLAKE. 157 

It was impossible to live, as Mrs. Blake 
did, on the most friendly terms with such a 
man and not be smitten with his life- 
thought. In not a few published social 
papers Mrs. Blake has thrown out valuable 
and suggestive hints as to the best means 
of bringing the weary world under the 
sweet sway of religion. Her voice, it is 
true, is but one voice in the social wil- 
derness, but individual efforts must not 
be thwarted, for is not a fresh period 
opening in which the individuality, the 
personality, of souls acting under the 
direct guidance of the Holy Ghost, will 
take up all that is good in modern ideas, 
and the cords of our tent be strengthened 
and its stakes enlarged ? " What we have 
to dread is neither ' historical rancor ' nor 
' philosophical atheism, ' " " nor the in- 
stinct of personal freedom." It is, in the 
words of Dr. Barry, that we should set 
little store by that " freedom wherewith 



158 MRS. BLAKE. 

Christ has made us free," and that being 
born into a church where we may have the 
grandest spiritual ideas for the asking, we 
should fold our hands in slumber and 
be found, at length, " disobedient to the 
heavenly vision." Against such perils 
Hecker, the noblest life as yet in our 
American church, made a life-fight. On 
his side was Boyle O'Reilly, Roche, Mrs. 
Blake, Katherine Conway and Louise 
Gruiney. Nor pass such lives in vain. 

Mrs. Blake was born in Dungarvan, Co. 
Waterford, Ireland. In childhood she was 
brought to Massachusetts. In 1865 she 
was married to Dr. J. G. Blake, a leading 
physician of Boston. She has made that 
city her home, and is highly esteemed 
in its literary and social circles. Among 
her published books may be mentioned 
" Poems," Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1882, 
dedicated to her husband; " On The Wing," 
a pretty volume of Californian sketches ; 



MRS. BLAKE. 159 

" Rambling Talk," a series of papers con- 
tributed to the Boston journals. 

Her sketches are the agreeable jottings of 
a highly cultivated woman ; seeing nature 
in the light of poetry rather than science, 
she has made a series of charming pic- 
tures out of her wanderings. They are 
not free from sentiment, — illusions if you 
will, but that is their greatest charm. 
"The world of reality is a poor affair." 
So many books of travel are annually 
appearing,— books that have no excuse for 
being other than to prove how widespread 
dulness and incapacity is, that a trip with 
a guide like Mrs. Blake has but one fail- 
ing, — its shortness. Neither in her travels 
nor in her literary articles does Mrs. Blake 
body forth her best prose utterance. These 
must be found in her earnest social papers, 
where her woman's heart, saddened by the 
miseries of its fellows, pours out its streams 
of consolation and preaches (all earnest 



160 MRS. BLAKE. 

souls must be preachers now-a-days) the 
only and all sufficient cure — the Church. 

An extract from one of these papers will 
best show her power. She is portraying 
the Church manifesting itself in the indi- 
vidual as well as the family life, pleading 
for the central idea of her system. " Jesus 
Christ is the complement of man," — the 
restorer of the race. The Catholic Church 
is the manifestation of Jesus Christ. 

" There are, alas ! too many weaknesses 
into which thoughtlessness and opportunity 
lead one class as well as the other. But 
still there is to be seen almost without 
exception, among practical Catholics, young- 
wives, content and happy, welcoming from 
the very outset of married life the blessed 
company of the little ones who are to 
guard them as do their angels in heaven ; 
proud like Cornelia of their jewels; gladly 
accepting comparative poverty and endless 
care ; while their sisters outside the Church 



MRS. BLAKE. 161 

buy the right to idleness and personal 
adorning at the expense of the childless 
homes which are a disgrace and menace 
to the nation. There is the honor and 
purity of the fireside respected ; the over • 
powering sweetness and strength of family 
ties acknowledged ; the reverential love 
that awaits upon the father and mother 
shown. There are sensitive and refined 
women bearing sorrow with resignation and 
hardship without rebellion ; combating pain 
with patience and fulfilling harsh duty 
without complaint. In a tremendous over- 
proportion to those who attempt to live 
outside its helpfulness, and in exact ratio 
to their practical devotion to the obser- 
vances of the Church, they find power of 
resisting temptation in spite of poverty, 
and overcoming impulse by principle. Can 
the world afibrd to ignore an agency by 
which so much is accomplished? 

"So much for the practical side, which is 



162 MES. BLAKE. 

the moral that particularly needs pointing 
at this moment. Of the spiritual ampli- 
tude and sustaining which the Church 
gives there is little need to speak. Only 
a woman can know what Faith means in 
the existence of women. The uplift which 
she needs in moments of great trial ; the 
sustaining power to bear the constant 
harassment of petty worries ; the outlet 
for emotions which otherwise choke the 
springs, the tonic of prayer and belief; 
the assurance of a force sufficiently divine 
and eternal to satisfy the cravings of 
human longing — what but this is to make 
life worth living for her? And where 
else, in these days of scepticism, is she to 
find such immortal dower? It is a com- 
mentary upon worldly wisdom, that it has 
attempted to ignore this necessity, and left 
woman under the increased pressure of 
her new obligations, to rely solely upon 
such frail reeds as human respect and con- 



MES. BLAKE. 163 

ventional morality. She needs the inspira- 
tion of profound conviction and practical 
piety a hundredfold more than ever before. 
The woman of the old time, secluded within 
the limits of the household, surrounded by 
the material safeguard of custom, might 
lead an untroubled existence even if devo- 
tion and faith were not vital principles 
with her. The woman of to-day, harassed, 
beset, tempted, driven by necessity, drawn 
this way and that by bad advice and worse 
example, is attempting a hopeless task 
when she tries the same experiment." 

The poetry of Mrs. Blake is rational 
and wholesome. She knows her gifts and 
is content to use them at their best, giving 
us songs in a minor key, that if they add 
little to human thought, yet make the 
world better from their coming. In the 
poems of childhood she is particularly 
happy. She knows children, their joys 
and sorrows, has caught their ways. Her's 



164 MRS. BLAKE. 

is a heart that has danced in the joy of 
motherhood and been stricken when the 
" dead do not waken." She is our only 
intelligent writer of children's poems. 
The assertion may be controverted. A 
hundred Catholic poets for children may 
be cited writers " of genius profound," of 
"exquisite fancy," "whose works should 
grace every parish library." I quote a 
stereotyped criticism, a constant expres- 
sion with Catholic reviewers. I laugh, in 
my hermitage, and blandly suggest, to all 
whom it may concern, that insanity in 
jingles is not relished by sane children. 
I speak from experience, having perpe- 
trated a selection from the one hundred 
on a class of bright boys and girls. Peace- 
ful sleep, and, let us hope, pleasant dreams, 
came to their aid. Shall I ever, Comus, 
forget their faces in the transition moment 
from dulness to delight? Let us cease 
cant and rapturous criticism. Catholic 



MRS. BLAKE. 165 

literature, to survive the time that gave 
it birth, must be built on other founda- 
tions. Hasty and unconscious productions 
must be branded as such. We must have, 
as the French so well put it, a horror of 
"pacotille" and " camelotte." "If my 
Avorks are good," said the sculptor Rude, 
"they will endure; if not, all the lauda- 
tion in the world would not save them 
from oblivion." The same may well be 
written of Catholic literature. Whether 
for children or grown-up men or women, 
as a Catholic critic, whose only aim has 
been to gain an audience for my fellow 
Catholic writers whose works can bear a 
favorable comparison with the best con- 
temporary thought, I ask that the best 
shall be given, and that given, it shall be 
joyfully received ; that trash shall not fill 
the book-cases, lie on the parlor-tables, be 
puifed in our weeklies, and genius and 
sacrifice be forgotten. I ask that the works 
12 



166 MRS. BLAKE. 

of Stoddard, Johnston, Egan, Roche, Aza- 
rias, Lathrop, Tabb, Miss Repplier, Guiney, 
Katherine Conway, Mrs. Biake, find a 
welcome in each Catholic household, and 
that the Catholic press make their delight- 
ful personalities known to our rising genera- 
tion. Of their best they have given. Shall 
they die before we acknowledge it ? 



AGNES REPPLIER. 



A friend of mine, a dweller in the city, 
a lover of red bricks, one to whom the 
sound of the dray-cart merrily grinding 
on the pavement is sweeter music than a 
burst of woodland song, has tardily con- 
ceded that the Adirondacks, on a summer 
day, is pleasant. I value his testimony 
and record it with pleasure. Let us be 
thankful for small favors when cynics are 



AGNES EEPPLIER. 167 

the donors. For me these woods, lakes 
and crystal streams hold an indescribable 
charm. They are the true abode of man. 
Here is liberty, while the city is but a cage, 
with its thousands uttering the plaintive 
cry of Sterne's prisoned starling, "I cannot 
get out." For the hum of wheels we have 
the songs of birds, the music of waterfalls, 
the purr of mountain brooks and the 
harmonies of the winds playing through 
the thousand different species of trees, each 
one differing in melody, but combining 
in one grand symphony. Orchestras are 
muffled music when compared to nature's 
lute. The pipes of Pan is but a poet's 
struggle to embody in speech such a 
symphony. For the city's smells, that not 
even a Ruskin could paint, albeit they are 
far from elusive, we have the mountain air 
that has dallied with the streams and stolen 
the fragrance of a thousand clover fields. 
Every man to his taste. There is no 



168 AGNES EEPPLIER. 

disputing of this. Lamb loved bricks and 
Wordsworth such scenes as ours ; yet, 
Lamb would be as sadly missed from our 
libraries as Wordsworth. Swing my ham- 
mock in the shade of yonder pines, good 
Patsy. A robin is piping his sweetest 
notes to his brooding spouse, the Salmon 
river runs at my feet, biting the sandy 
shore, laughing loud when a saucy stone 
falls in its current*. From over the hills 
comes the scent of new-mown hay ; bless 
me ! this is pleasant. To add to this enjoy- 
ment you have brought a book — something 
bright, you tell me. I'll soon see. And 
gliding into my hammock, I said my first 
good morning to Agnes Repplier. It was 
a breezy good morning, one of those where 
the hand unconsciously goes out as much as 
to say : Old fellow, you don't know how glad 
I am to see you. There was no friend with 
a white cravat standing on the first page to 
introduce us, and tell us that the authoress 



AGNES REPPLIER. 169 

bore in her book a fecund message to 
struggling humanity, and that the major 
part of that same humanity could not see 
it; hence it was his duty to stand at the 
portal and solve the riddle. There was no 
begging for recognition on the score of 
ancestors, fads or isms. I am Agnes 
Repplier, said the book ; how do you like 
me? A few pages perused, and my own 
voice amusingly fell on my ears, saying- 
first class. Here was a woman who thought 
— not the trivial thought that nauseates in 
the books of so many literary women — but 
virile aggressive thought, that provokes, 
contradicts, and, like Hamlet's ghost, will 
not be downed. This thought is folded in 
a garment, whose many hues quicken the 
curiosity and make her pages a continual 
feast of wit, droll irony, and illuminative 
criticism all curiously and harmoniously 
blended. Her pages are rich in sugges- 
tion, apt in quotation. You are constantly 



170 AGNES REPPLIER. 

aroused, put on your guard, laughingly 
disarmed, and that in a way that Lamb 
would have loved. She has no awe in the 
presence of literary gods. Lightly she 
trips up to them with her poniard, shows 
by a pass that they are made of mud, and 
that the aureole that encircles them is but 
the work of your crude imagination. Clear- 
ing away your shreds and patches she puts 
the author in a plain suit before you, and, 
how you wonder, that with all your boasted 
knowledge you have called for years a 
jackdaw a peacock! 

How delightful to watch this critic 
armed cap-a-pie, demolishing some fad, that 
has masqueraded for years as genuine 
literature. Is it little Lord Fauntleroy, a 
character sloppy, inane, impossible to real 
life, yet hugged to the heart by the 
commonplace. Miss Repplier keenly sur- 
veys her ground, as an artist would the 
statue of his rival, notes the foibles, cant, 



AGNES KEPPLIER. 171 

false poses, and crazy-quilt jargon used 
to deck pet characters. Experience has 
taught her that you cannot combat seriously 
the commonplace. " The statesman or the 
poet," says Dudley Warner, " who launches 
out unmindful of this, will be likely to 
come to grief in his generation." Sly 
humor, pungent sarcasm, are the weapons 
eifectively used. The little Lord is un- 
robed, and the life that seemed so full of 
charity and virtue, becomes but a mixture 
of hypocrisy and snobbery. Yet, if some 
of our critics could, "all the dear old 
nursery favorites must be banished from 
our midst, and the rising generation of 
prigs must be nourished exclusively on 
Little Lord Fauntleroy, and other carefully 
selected specimens of milk and water diet." 
The dear land of romance, in its most 
charming phase, that phase represented by 
Red Riding Hood, Ali Baba, Blue Beard, 
and the other heroes of our nurseryhood 



172 AGNES EEPPLIER. 

must be eliminated, for children are no 
longer children, in the old sense of believ- 
ing "in such stuff" without questioning. 
American children, at any rate, are too 
sensitively organized to endure the unre- 
deemed ferocity of the old fairy stories, we 
are told, and it is added, " no mother 
nowadays tells them in their unmitigated 
brutality." These are the empty sayings 
of the realists, who would have every 
child break its dolls to analyze the saw^dust. 
The most casual observer of American 
homes knows that our children will not be 
fed on such stuff as realists are able to 
give, but will turn wistfully back to those 
brave old tales which are their inheritance 
from a splendid past, and of which no 
hand shall rob them. As Miss Repplier 
so well puts it, " we could not banish Blue 
Beard if we would. He is as immortal as 
Hamlet, and when hundreds of years shall 
have passed over this uncomfortably en- 



AGNES REPPLIEB. 173 

lightened world, the children of the future 
— who, thank Heaven, can never, with all 
our efforts, be born grown-up — will still 
tremble at the blood-stained key, and re- 
joice when the big brave brothers come 
galloping up the road." Ferocity, brutal- 
ity, if you will, may couch on every page, 
but this is much better than the sugared 
nothingness of Sunday school tales, and 
beats all hollow, as the expression goes, 
the many tricks perpetrated on children by 
the school of analytical fiction. Children 
will read Blue Beard, and thank Heaven, 
as grown-up men, for such a childish 
pleasure, adding a prayer for her who 
wrote the " Battle of the Babies." Bunner 
and others have accused Miss Repplier of 
ignoring contemporary works, of rudely 
closing in their face her library door and 
saying he who enters here must have 
outgrown his swaddling clothes, must have 
rounded out his good half-century. This 



174 AGNES REPPLIEB. 

may be one of Bunner's skits. Even if it 
were not, there is more than one precedent 
to follow. Hazlitt, in his delightful chat 
on the " Reading of Old Books," begins 
his essay, " I hate to read new books." 
This author has the courage of his convic- 
tions ; you do not grope in the dark to 
know whv. Here is the reason, and it is 
easier to assent to it than to deny it. 
" Contemporary writers may generally be 
divided into two classes — one's friends or 
one's foes. Of the first we are compelled 
to think too well, and of the last we are 
disposed to think too ill, to receive much 
genuine pleasure from the perusal, or to 
judge fairly of the merits of either. One 
candidate for literary fame, who happens 
to be of our acquaintance writes finely, and 
like a man of genius ; but unfortunately 
has a foolish fad, which spoils a delicate 
passage; — another inspires us with the 
highest respect for his personal talents and 



AGNES REPPLIER. 175 

character, but does not come quite up to 
our expectation in print." All these con- 
tradictions and petty details interrupt the 
calm current of our reflections. These are 
sound reasons ; as if to clinch them he 
adds, " but the dust, smoke, and noise of 
modern literature have nothing in common 
with the ]3ure, silent air of immortality." 
Miss Repplier, an admirer of Hazlitt, 
and if one may hazard a guess, her master 
in style, would not go so far. She believes 
in keeping up with a decent portion of 
current literature, and " this means per- 
petual labor and speed," whereas idleness 
and leisure are requisite for the true enjoy- 
ment of books. To read all the frothings 
of the press for the sake of being called a 
contemporary critic were madness. She 
concurs with another critic that reading is 
not a duty, and that no man is under any 
obligation to read what another man wrote. 
When Miss Repplier stumbles across an 



176 AGNES REPPLIER. 

unknown volume, picking it up dubiously, 
and finds in it an hour of placid but 
genuine enjoyment, although it is a modern 
book, wanting in sanctifying dust, she will 
use all her art to make in other hearts a 
loving welcome for the little stranger. " A 
By- Way in Fiction " tells in her own way, 
of a recent book born of Italian soil and 
sunshine, " The Chevalier of Pensieri 
Vani." It is the essayist's right to read 
those books, ancient or modern, that are to 
her taste, and it is a bit of impertinence in 
any writer to particularly recommend to 
Miss Repplier a list of books, which she is 
naturally indisposed to consider w^ith much 
kindness, thrust upon her as they are, like 
paregoric or porous plaster. " If there be 
people who can take their pleasures medi- 
cinally, let them read by prescription and 
grow fat." Our authoress can do her own 
quarrying. One of the darts thrown at 
this charming writer is, that she would 



AGNES EEPPLIER. 177 

have children pore through books at their 
own sweet, wild will, unoppressed by that 
modern infliction — foot-notes. That, when 
a child would meet the word dog, an 
asterisk would not hold him to a foot-note 
occupying a page and giving all that science 
knows about that interesting animal. This 
is precisely the privilege that your modern 
critic will not allow. He will have his 
explanations, his margins, "build you a 
bridge over a rain-drop, put ladders up a 
pebble, and encompass you on every side 
with ingenious alpen-stocks and climbing 
irons, yet when perchance you stumble and 
hold out a hand for help, behold! he is 
never there to grasp it." What does a 
boy, plunging into Scott or Byron, want 
with these atrocities? The imagery that 
peoples his mind, the music that sweeps 
through his soul, these, and not your stilted 
erudition, are the milk and honey of boy- 
hood. " I once knew a boy," says Miss 



178 AGNES REPPLIER. 

Repplier, in that sparkling defense, ' Op- 
pression of Notes,' "who so delighted in 
Byron's description of the dying gladiator 
that he made me read it to him over and 
over again. He did not know — and I 
never told him — what a gladiator was. 
He did not know that it was a statue, and 
not a real man described. He had not the 
faintest notion of what was meant by the 
Danube, or the Dacian mother or a Roman 
holiday; historically and geographically, 
the boy's mind was a happy blank. There 
was nothing intelligent, only a blissful 
stirring of the heartstrings by reason of 
strong words and swinging verse, and his 
own tangle of groping thoughts." Had 
the reader stopped the course of the swing- 
ing verse to explain these unknown words, 
boyish happiness would have flown, op- 
pression become complete, and let us hope 
sleep would have rescued the bored boy 
from such an ordeal. 



AGNES REPPLIER. 179 

Cowley, full of good sense, is on the side 
of our essayist. In his essay " On Myself" 
he relates the charm of verse, falling on 
his boyish ear, without comprehending 
fully its purport. "I believe I can tell the 
particular little chance that filled my head 
first with such chimes of verse as have 
never since left ringing there. For I re- 
member when I began to read, and to take 
some pleasure in it, there was wont to lie 
in my mother's parlor (I know not by what 
accident, for she herself never in her life 
read any book but of devotion), but there 
was wont to lie Spenser's works ; this I 
happened to fall upon, and was infinitely 
delighted with the stories of the knights, 
giants, and monsters, and brave houses, 
which I found everywhere there (though 
my understanding had little to do with all 
this) , and by degrees with the tinkling of 
the rhyme and dance of the numbers, so 
that I think I had read him all over, before 



180 AGNES EEPPLIER. 

I was twelve years old, and was thus made 
a poet as immediately as a child is made 
an eunuch." The charm of Miss Repplier's 
pages lies in their good sense. She is a 
lover of the good and beautiful, a hater 
of shams and shoddies. Everything she 
touches becomes more interesting, whether 
it be Gastronomy, Old Maids, Cats, Babies, 
or the New York Custom House. Like 
Lamb and Hazlitt, a lover of old books, 
finding in them the pure silent air of 
immortality, she will welcome graciously 
any new book whose worth is its passport. 
Agnes Repplier was born in the city of 
brotherly love more than thirty years ago. 
Her father was John Repplier, a well- 
known coal merchant. Her earliest play- 
mates were books. Her mother a brilliant 
and lovable woman, fond of books, and, as 
a friend of her's informed me, a writer of 
ability, watched over and directed the 
education of her more brilliant daughter. 



AGNES KEPPLIER. 181 

Under such a mother, amid scenes of cul- 
ture, Agnes grew up, finding in books a 
solace for ill-health that still continues to 
harry her. When she entered the arena 
of authorship, by training and study she 
was well equipped. At once she was 
reckoned as a sovereign princess of " That 
proud and humble . . . Gripsey Land," 
one of the very elect of Bohemia. She 
came, as Stedman says, "with gentle satire 
or sparkling epigram to brush aside the 
fads and fallacies of this literary fin de 
siecle, calling upon us to return to the 
simple ways of the masters." Her charm- 
ing volumes should be in the hands of 
every student of literature as a corrective 
against the debasing theories and tenden- 
cies of modern book-making. The student 
will find that if she does not know all 
things in heaven and on earth, she may 
plead in the language of Little Breeches : 
13 



182 AGNES BEPPLIER. 

" I never ain't had no show ; 
But I've got a middlin' tight grip, sir 
• On the handful o' things I know." 



A WORD. 



LITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC 
POOR. 



We are told, with some show of truth, 
that this age shall be noted in history as one 
given to the study of social problems. The 
contemporary literature of a country is a 
good index to what people are thinking 
about. Magazines are, as a rule, for their 
time, and deal with the forces upward in 
men's minds. The most cursory glance at 
their contents will show the predominance 
of the Social Problem treated from some 
phase or other. The best minds are en- 
gaged as partisans. Social science may be 
said to be the order of the day. It has 
crushed poetry to the skirts of advertising, 
romance is its happy basking ground. The 

185 



186 LITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR. 

drama has made it its own. There are 
some, fogies of course, so says your sapient 
scientist, who believe that the social science 
so spasmodically treated in current litera- 
ture is but a passing fad, and that poetry 
shall be restored to her old quarters, ro- 
mance amuse as of old, and the drama be 
winnowed of rant, scenic sensatioA, and 
bestial morality. These dreams may be 
vain, but then even fogies have their hopes. 
A branch of this science — the tree is over- 
shadowing — treats of the literature and the 
masses. Anvthinp: about the masses in- 
terests me. 

When I read the other day, "Literature 
and the Masses ; a Social Study,'* among 
the contents of a fin de siecle magazine, I 
would have pawned my wearing apparel 
rather than go home without it. Its read- 
ing was painful, as all reading must be 
where the author knows less about his 
subject than the ordinary reader. Later, 



LITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR. 187 

another article fell in my way, dealing>ith 
the same subject. Its author had more 
material, but his use of it was clumsy. It 
was while reading this article, that I noted 
the utter stupidity with which things 
Catholic are treated by the ordinary lit- 
erary purveyor. These ephemeral pen- 
wielders seem to hold the most fantastic 
notions of the Church. What Azarias says 
of Emerson is true of them : " They seek 
truth in every religious and philosophical 
system outside of the teachings of the 
Catholic Church." They will not drink 
from Rome. To correct all this author's 
errors is not my plan. In this paper I 
restrict myself to a part of the same sub- 
ject. Literature and Our Catholic Poor. I 
prefer an independent study to patch- 
work. It is the usual thing in such studies 
to present credentials. I present mine. 
Five years' life in the tenement districts of 
New York and other great cities of the 



188 LITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR. 

Union, in full contact, from the peculiarity 
of my position, with the poor. During 
these years I was led to make a study of 
their reading. This study, to be intelligible, 
must be prefaced by a few hints on their 
life and environment. It is useless to deny 
the often -repeated assertion that their lot 
in the great cities is hard and crushing. It 
is a continual struggle for nominal ex- 
istence. The children commence work at a 
premature age. Their education is meagre 
and broken. Marriage is entered in early 
life, without the slightest provision. To 
these marriages there is little selection. 
The girls have been brought up in fac- 
tories, household restraint frets their soul. 
Of household economy, so necessary to the 
city toiler, they know nothing. If ends 
meet it is well. If not, there is trust and 
sorrow. The day of their marriage means 
a few stuffy rooms, badly ventilated, filled 
with the most bizarre and useless furniture 



LITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR. 189 

put in by shylock, who will, in the coming 
years, exact ten times their value. Thus 
started, children are born, puny and sickly, 
prey of physician and druggist. If these 
children survive, at an early age they fol- 
low the father and mother by entering 
foundries and factories to toil life's weary 
round away. When they die the family is 
pauperized for years. It is a common 
plaint of the tenements that '' I would have 
been worth something if my boy had not 
died." Every death is not only a drain on 
the immediate family, but on their friends, 
who are supposed to turn out and give 
"the corpse a decent burial." The decent 
burial means coaches, flowers and whiskey. 
The most casual observer must notice the 
giant part liquor plays, in the lives of the 
poor. Liquor and its concomitant, tobacco, 
in the deadly form of cigarettes, are known 
to the boy. He has been brought up in 
that atmosphere. His father has his cheap, 



190 LITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR. 

ill- smelling cigar and frothy pint for sup- 
per. His mother and a few gossiping 
friends have chased the heavy day with a 
few pints "because they were dry." He 
delights in being the Mercury of the 
"growler." Hanging by the balustrade he 
sips the beer, "just to taste it." That taste, 
alas, lingers through life. As he grows 
older it becomes more refined. His teach- 
ers are the sumptuous, dazzling bar-rooms 
guarding each city corner, while betraying 
the nation. The owners of these vice 
palaces are wise in their generation. For 
his stuffy home, broken furniture and 
cheerless aspects, they show him wide, airy 
rooms, polished furniture, bevelled glass 
mirrors, dazzling light, music, gaiety, com- 
panionship, and the illusive charm of rev- 
elry. The reading matter in such places 
is on a par with the other attractions. It 
is sensational. Its authors are skilled in 
the base development of the passions. It 



LITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR. 191 

smacks obscenity, and early dulls the intel- 
lect to finer things. To be enmeshed in its 
threads is the greatest sorrow of a young 
life. When the bar-room does not allure, 
there is another siren to be taken into ac- 
count. It is the promiscuous gathering at 
the neighbor's house who has been so un- 
fortunate as to find a music dealer to trust 
him with a piano at three times its price. 
Here gather the Romeos and Juliets to 

" Sing and dance 
And parley vous France, 
Drink beer Alanna 
And play on tlie grand piano." 

The songs are of no literary value, some- 
times comic, sometimes sentimental, more 
often with an ambiguity that is more sug- 
gestive than downright obscenity. Of the 
so-called comic, "McGinty" was a great 
hit, while "After the Ball" was its equal 
in the sentimental line. It is a strange 
sight to see pale, flaccid, worn-out Juliet 



192 LITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR. 

thrum the indifferent piano, while near her 
in a dramatic posture, learned from some 
melo- dramatic actor, stands twisted Romeo, 
singing some sentimental song, balancing 
his voice to the poor performer, and indif- 
ferent piano. To hear such stuff — ^I speak 
from auricular demonstration — is no small 
affliction. After songs come dances, weary 
night flies quickly away. Work comes 
with the morrow. Sleepy and tired they 
buckle on their armor and go out uncom- 
plainingly to tear and wear the sickly body. 
Thus generation after generation passes to 
the tread-mill and beyond. It is not to be 
expected that the literature of such people 
would be of a high grade. To say that 
they have no time to read were a fallacy, 
inasmuch as they do read. Here the ques- 
tion arises, what do they read ? I answer 
that they possess a literature of their own, 
both in weekly journals and published vol- 
umes. They support, strange as it may 



LITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR. 193 

seem, a school of novelists for their delecta- 
tion. These journals are a medley of Blood- 
and- thunder stories, far-fetched jokes, 
sporting news, etiquette as she is above 
stairs, marriage hints, palmistry, dress 
making, now and then a page of original 
topical music hemmed with fake advertis- 
ing. The point to be noted in these jour- 
nals, a shrewd business one, they are never 
beyond the reader's intelligence. Their 
novels must be simple and amusing. That 
is, their author must know how to spin a 
story. He must amuse. Each weekly in- 
stalment must have its comic as well as 
tragic denouement. The hero must be a 
villain of the most approved type, neither 
wanting in courage nor in cunning. The 
heroine must be on the side of the angelic, 
mesmerized by the prowess of her hero. 
A vast quantity of supers are constantly 
on hand, in case of emergency. Murders, 
suicides, broken hearts and lesser afflictions 



194 LITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR. 

are of frequent occurrence. The hero may 
perish at any moment, provided a more 
reckless devil takes his place. Half a dozen 
heroines may come to grief in one serial. 
An author must be lavish. Provided he is, 
style is not reckoned, and bad grammar 
but adds a taking flavor. Woe be to the 
editor who would inflict on his readers a 
novel of the school of Henry James or Paul 
Bourget. The masses hold that the pri- 
mary condition of fiction is to amuse. They 
are right. TJiese journals are carried in 
ladies' satchels, they stick out of young 
men's pockets. On ferry-boats, in street 
cars, in their stuffy rooms, in the few min- 
utes snatched from the dinner hour they 
are eagerly read. They may be crumpled 
and thrust into the pocket at any moment. 
No handwashing is necessary to handle 
them. Their cost is light, five cents a week. 
By a system of interchange a club of five 
may for that cost peruse five different story 



LITERATtrRE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR. 195 

papers. This system is in general practice. 
The greatest amount for the least money 
strongly appeals to the poor. The novels 
in book form are of a much lower grade 
than the serials. Written by profligate men 
and women, in a vile style, their only ob- 
ject is to undermine morality. Falsity to 
the marriage vows, deception, theft, the 
catalogue of a criminal court, is strongly 
inculcated as the right path. These novels, 
generally in paper covers, are showy and 
eye-catching. A voluptuous siren on the 
cover, with an ambiguous title allures the 
minor to his ruin. I have known not a 
few book-sellers who passed as eminently 
respectable, do a thriving trade in this class 
of books. The fact that they kept the stock 
in drawers in the rear of their stores told 
of their conscious complicity in the destruc- 
tion and degradation of our youth. These 
novels are cheap, within the reach of the 
poor, a point to be noted. The question 



196 LITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR. 

arises, what can be done to counteract this 
spread of pernicious literature among our 
Catholic poor? There is but one answer 
on the lips of those who should be heard ; 
fight it with good literature — yet literature 
not beyond their understanding. Put in 
their hands good novels, whose primary 
purpose is to amuse. The good-natured 
gentleman who would put into the hands 
of the poor as a Christmas gift Fabiola, 
Callista, Pauline Seward, etc., would make 
a great mistake. These books would be- 
come playthings for greasy babies or curled 
paper to light the "evening smoke." The 
bread winners will not be bored. They 
have worked hard all day, and at evening 
want some kind of amusement. The book 
must be nervy, a tonic. Dictionaries are 
scarce in the haunts of the poor. Foot-notes 
are an abomination. The author must 
whisk the reader along. A rapid canter, 
only broken by hearty laughter or honest 



LITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR. 197 

pity. Have we any Catholic novels that 
will do this? It is the plaint of the know- 
nothing scribes, tossing their empty skulls, 
to write a capital No. From experience I 
answer yes. The novels of that true writer 
of boys' stories, Father Finn, are just the 
thing for the poor. They want to read of 
boys that are not old men, none of your 
goody-goody little nobodies. A boy is no 
fool. In real life he would not chum with 
your sweet little Toms, your praying, 
psalm-singing Jamies, and your dying 
angelic Marys. Nor shall he in books, 
thank heaven. Father Finn has drawn the 
boy as he is. His books would be joyfully 
welcomed, if published in a cheap paper 
form, say at twenty -five cents per copy. 
List to the wail of the fattening Catholic 
publisher, who will read that idea. It is, 
however, a sane one. If Protestants can 
make cheap books, thereby creating the 
market, why not Catholics? Until this is 
14 



198 LITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR. 

done it is useless to cry out, as authors do, 
nobody will buy my books. Yes, your 
books will be bought if they are reason- 
able in price, and properly placed before 
the public. As it is, your books are snuffed 
out by the immense amount of trash 
handled by the ordinary Catholic book- 
seller, and you help this by writing deep- 
dyed hypocrisy of the trash -makers. Aza- 
rias mildly expresses my idea in one of his 
posthumous papers: "Catholic reviewers 
must plead guilty to the impeachment of 
having been in the past too laudatory of 
inferior work." The stories of that ster- 
ling man, Malcolm Johnston, called Dukes- 
borough Tales, I once gave to a wretched 
family. On visiting them a week after, 
what delight it was to hear the health - 
giving laughter they had found in them. 
To another family I gave Billy Downs. 
Asking how they liked them, I was told 
that they were as "fine as silk." A youth 



LITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR. 199 

of fourteen, his face decidedly humorous, 
volunteered the criticism that "Billy had 
no grit." During the illness of four or five 
patients of mine I read the assembled 
family " Chumming With a Savage," "Joe 
of Lahaina." When I came to the final sen- 
tence in Joe, where Charlie Stoddard leaves 
him "sitting and singing in the mouth of 
his grave — clothed all in death," two of the 
youngsters burst into tears, while the father 
much agitated, said, "Doctor, I don't see 
how he had the heart to leave him." They 
were so much attached to the book that, 
although it had been my choice old chum 
in many a land, I gave it to them. Lately 
I gave "Life Around Us," a collection of 
stories by Maurice F. Egan. It was a great 
success. Egan has the true touch for the 
masses when he wishes. Another little 
story much prized was Nugent Robinson's 
"Better Than Oold." To these might be 
added in cheap form those of Marian 



200 LITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR. 

Bruiiowe, May Crowley, Helen Sweeney, a 
promising young writer, and Lelia Bugg. 
How to reach the poor with these books 
presents few obstacles. Cardinal Vaughan 
has solved the difficulty in England. At- 
tach to every parish church in city and 
country a library of well selected interest- 
ing Catholic books. Let their circulation 
be free of charge. The great majority of 
Catholic poor attend some of the Sunday 
Masses. If the library is open, they will 
gladly take a book home. The reading of 
this book will instil a taste. They will tell 
their friends of it. It will be the subject 
of many a chat. If it is cheap, not a few of 
the neighbors will wish to purchase it. 
Their criticism, always racy and generally 
correct, will, as Birrell has pointed out in 
one of his essays, be its sure pass to success. 
After a year's friendly intercourse the 
library will become a necessity, and they 
will gladly pay a fee for their week's de- 



LITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR. 



201 



light. The author that has won their hearts 
will be on their lips, his new books, on 
account of old ties, will be eagerly pur- 
chased and loudly proclaimed. 

Families that are shy and backward as 
church-members, might be visited and 
literature left. This I hold is priestly work. 
If they come not to Christ, let us, as the 
teachers of old, bring Christ to them. It 
will be read. After your footsteps can be 
no longer heard curiosity will come to your 
assistance. The little maid will pick it up, 
the parents will read. I have again and 
again left those charming temperance 
manifestoes of Father Mahony in homes of 
squalor and misery, the outcome of weekly 
drunks. These stray leaves, I am happy 
to write, in many cases marked the begin- 
ning of better things. 

To counteract the serials is, to use an ex- 
pression, a horse of another color. Our 
weeklies are, as a general rule, dull. The 



202 J.ITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR. 

poor take a squint at some of the dailies. 
This squint gives them the gist of their 
world. They do not care, as they will tell 
you, "to be reading the same thing over 
twice." Our weeklies are too often a re- 
hash of the dailies. Another remark that 
I often heard among them is, "that our 
weeklies have too much Irish news." They 
are not wanting in patriotism to the home 
of many of their fathers, yet what interest 
could they be supposed to take in the long- 
winded personal rivalries of Irish states- 
men, or the rank rant of the one hundred 
orators that strut that unhappy isle. A 
bit of McCarthy, or Sexton, will be wel- 
comed, but they rightly draw the line at 
page after page of rhodomontade. If, in- 
stead of this stuff, living articles were 
written, short stories, poems, biographies 
of eminent Catholics, their Church and her 
great mission made known, then would the 
poor read, and a powerful weapon against 



LITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR. 203 

the serials be placed in our hands. There 
are some of our weeklies that cannot be 
classed under this criticism. They are 
few. 

The Ave Maria, founded and conducted 
by one who is thoroughly capable, could be 
easily made a great favorite with the poor. 
Its contents are varied and replete with 
good things. I have used it with effect. 
Another and later venture is the Young 
Catholic, by the Paulists, which will fill a 
want. Its editor is full of sane ideas. 
Boys' stories, full of adventure, spirited 
pictures, will win it a way to all young- 
hearts. These papers may never reach the 
poor, if folding our arms we stand idly 
by, expecting the masses by intuition to 
know their value. Could not parish libraries 
have cheap editions for free distribution 
among the poorer denizens ? To defray 
expenses, a collection might be taken up 
twice a year. No good Catholic will be- 



204 LITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR. 

grudge a few cents, when he knows that it 
will go to brighten the hard life of his less 
fortune-favored brother. The critic who 
does nothing in life but sneer may call this 
Utopian. It is the old cuckoo call, known 
to every man that tries to help his fellows. 
Newman, Barry, Lilly, Brownson, Hecker, 
Ireland, Spalding, all the glittering names 
on our rosary have heard it, and went their 
way, knowing full well that if the finger of 
God traces their path, human obstacles are 
of little weight. The plan, however, is 
eminently practical. In one of the poorest 
parishes in the diocese of Ogdensburgh, 
it has been tried and with abundant suc- 
cess. I remember well last summer with 
what pleasure I heard a mountain urchin 
ask his pastor, *' Father, can I have the 
Pilot 9^^ This urchin had made the ac- 
quaintance of James Jeffrey Roche and 
Katherine E. Conway. He was in good 
company. Infidelity is going to our poor. 



LITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR. 205 

Her weapon is the printing press. The 
pulpit is well, but its arm is too short. 

Shall we stand idly by and lose our own, 
or shall we buckle on the armor of intelli- 
gent methods as mirrored in this paper, 
thereby not only delivering our own from 
its coarseness and petrifaction, but carry- 
ing the kindly light to those who know us 
not? Let us remember in these days, 
when socialism claims the poor, that our 
Church is not alone for the cultured, it is 
pre-eminently her duty to lead and guide 
the masses. This, to a great extent, must 
be done by the newspaper and book-stall. 

Our Church must man the printing 
press with the same zeal which ani- 
mated the Jesuit scholars, explorers and 
civilizers of three hundred years ago; 
" then will our enemies be as much sur- 
prised as disheartened." 



GREEN GRAVES IN IRELAND. 

By WALTER LECKY, 

Authw of ^''Adirondack Sketches,'" "Down at Caxton's," etc. 



PRESS COMMENTS: 

A new beam, a new factor in American Literature. — 
Maurice F. Egan. 

Charming essays. — C Wai^en Stoddard. 

They deserve book form. — Brother Azarias. 

Destined to win early recognition, — B. Malcolm Johnston. 

Lecky imitates himself. He is pungent, witty, humorous 
and epigrammatic, with dashes of occasional eloquence. — 
Eugene Davis in Western Watchman. 

" Green Graves in Ireland," by Walter Lecky, is a delightful 
little book. — Western Watchman. 

It is a well written, and pathetic tribute to the heroes who 
suffered in the holy cause of freedom. — Donahoe^s Magazine. 

There is mingled pathos and humor in the volume. — 
Ave Maria. 

The author's style is bright and pungent ; and this literary 
flavor he preserves throughout the pages of this very attractive 
book. He understands the spirit and sparkle of the Irish 
mind, and he has caught a good deal of it in his jaunting car 
excursions about the Irish capital. — Catholic World. 

A clever monograph. Walter Lecky has written exquisitely. 
— Catholic News, N. Y. 

The book will interest all who really love the country of the 
bards, and will be an excellent stimulus to young persons in- 
clined to forget the fame of their ancestors. — Boston Pilot. 



Large literary ability. — Union Times. 

An important and valuable addition to the growing litera- 
ture of America. — True Witness. 

The paper and type of the little volume are excellent ; sur- 
prisingly so, for the low price at which it may be procured. 
For the rest we can say that Mr. Lecky's style invests his 
subject with a charm which, we think, will induce the most 
unwilling reader who has opened his little book to persevere 
through its entire contents. — American Ecclesiastical Review. 

Walter Lecky is comparatively a new name in literature, but 
it is one destined to stand for good and beautiful things, 
especially the Catholic readers. His Adirondack sketches in 
the Catholic World are one of the brightest features of that 
excellent magazine. — Boston Pilot. 



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